Sam Mendes Gets It Wrong -- Again

Rating: 3/10 (28 June 2010)

Sam Mendes' entire film career has consisted of woefully misguided attempts to dissect the many ills of American culture without remotely understanding them. Perhaps he should spend some time slinging his arrows at Britain's problems before jumping across the pond.
"American Beauty" is a movie about American suburban malaise set in a version of suburban America that simply doesn't exist. Its characters are either gross and grotesque caricatures or mere vessels for regurgitating Alan Ball's pretentious screenplay, forced to utter lines that never sound like things people would actually say. Kevin Spacey gives the consummate Spacey performance -- one-note snideness delivered in a sardonic monotone -- that he gives every time he's in front of a camera, while poor Annette Bening is unwatchable in a frenzied performance that I have to believe was forced on her by the director, since she's never again been as bad, either before or since. The worst of the film's dialogue is reserved for all of the angst-filled teenagers, and most conspicuously for Wes Bentley, a tortured and philosophic youth who reads a ridiculous soliloquy about the beauty to be found in a plastic bag as if he's reciting Shakespeare.
The film has a weird preoccupation with homosexuality that doesn't really fit and makes itself most manifest in the character of Chris Cooper, a closeted ex-serviceman who, true to the film's form, is depicted as a goulish representative of conservative America.
What is the point you ask of all this glib satire? Hell if I know.
Grade: D