Middlebrow elegy

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 1999)

This debut feature by the director Sam Mendes and the screenwriter Alan Ball seems to move people deeply--it's a haunting elegy for lives of quiet desperation to some. The hero, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a middle-aged wage slave who wakes up one day with a new slant on life. His wife (Annette Bening) is a success-crazed, sexless android more obsessed with her pruning shears and her garden of ripe red roses than the conjugal bed. His job at a media magazine, he finds, consists largely of "masking my contempt for my superiors." And his daughter is as sullen and insulated as a hedgehog, filled with recrimination for her absentee-landlord parents. The joy of springtime only arrives in the form of the daughter's best friend--a snooty blond cheerleader (Mena Suvari) onto whom Lester projects lusty fantasies: he imagines her popping her training bra, and an avalanche of ripe red rose petals pours out. In this seemingly ordinary girl, if nowhere else, Lester finds a way to make his drab life into a Rose Bowl parade.
As directed by Mendes, in the underlining style of early Mike Nichols, AMERICAN BEAUTY has the bland but polished-to-a-gleam appearance of Quality Television. It's like a serious one-hour drama's Emmy submission. Alan Ball was previously a writer for CYBILL, and has a new series debuting called OH, GROW UP!, and the movie suggests the pitfalls of trying to construct a tragic dimension onto characters who are conceived in sitcom terms. Ball and Mendes want to have it both ways--they want characters as huggable and familiar as sitcom characters, but they also want to haunt us with the inevitability of their collapse, in the manner of one of the Coen brothers' what-fools-these-mortals-be noir scenarios. (Ball's script would be better served by the arctic detachment of the Coens' style in FARGO.)
The movie sets up a series of dissatisfied suburban characters of different ages, including the most successfully drawn of the lot, a steel-plated teenage video artist with a savage Marine for a dad (well played by Chris Cooper), who is like a Victorian aesthete with the pressurized manner of a Vulcan. As this level-headed kid--surely an idealized self-portrait by Ball, the artist as the ultimate cool cucumber--the newcomer Wes Bentley gives a vivid, straight-shooting performance that's as refreshing as a faceful of cold aftershave. But as the shlubb hero Lester, Kevin Spacey seems incapable of conveying the sleepy depression of a very ordinary guy. Spacey is all subterfuges and subtext--that's the tricky delight of him as an actor. He makes the audience feel they're eavesdropping on his secretest, dirtiest thoughts. But he seems to have been cast here to make certain things about Lester questionable without having to state the questions outright, and the sight of him leering at a cute teenage girl is far creepier than Jeremy Irons' quivering in LOLITA. (Spacey's one-on-one scenes with Bentley have far more crackle.) Mendes' favorite acting style seems derived from a boffo Broadway show: he likes actors who illustrate emotions rather than being bulldozed by them. The whole movie feels overrehearsed, tidy. (Conrad Hall's cinematography makes diagrammable points.)
You can see why the big cheese behind this movie, Steven Spielberg, responded to the material: Lester is like a Joe Sixpack hero in a Spielberg movie put through "dark" and "harrowing" paces in the clearest, most digestible way. After the filmmakers set up the characters, there's nothing left except to watch them hang out for an hour, and then wait to find out who will precipitate the tragic outcome. It's telling of the thinness of the movie's conception that the one character who never gets to become three-dimensional is Annette Bening's Caroline; even her moments of yearning and pleasure are cartoony, James L. Brooksish. The movie is as trapped in its need to please, to be "presentable," as the harpie Caroline is.
All this said, the movie has stayed with me hours after seeing it. The sticking power of the picture, I think, is in Wes Bentley's character--his helplessness before his awe at the video images he records. He's the one person in the movie who genuinely doesn't care what other people think of him, and his mixture of ineffable loneliness and determination is affecting. With no irony intended, Ball suggests that the way out of hell for the characters young enough to escape is to flee to New York City.
The thought that bohemian life in New York might not be its own rose-lined prison may be the funniest thing in the movie.