Why this film is a home run (and "The Ice Storm" wasn't)

Rating: 7/10 (1 April 2000)

Now, several months after I first saw "American Beauty" is prompted to thinking about it again, not so much by the Oscar hoopla, but rather by a comment made recently by esteemed screenwriter William Goldman, during an interview on Charlie Rose - he said that the only real difference between "The Ice Storm" and "American Beauty" is that the latter is a financial hit, while the former was not.
What is the element that seperates these two, essentially similar films, equally well-made films, that accounts for the disparity at the Box-Office? Mr. Goldman would say simply that people wanted to see "American Beauty" and did not want to see "The Ice Storm" - though (and he knows this) it goes a little deeper than that.
Both are keen studies of suburban inertia, the key difference is that "The Ice Storm" is a hermetically sealed one, it does not seek to engage the audience in a way that "American Beauty" does, it is a tightly focussed character study. "American Beauty" engages us from the get go, with the "Sunset Boulevard"-esque voice over delivered right to us. More precisely than that, "American Beauty" speaks to something universal in all of us - we ALL believe that we see beauty in a place that no one else does, it alone is OUR beauty, because we have taken the time to look closer.
(When I told this to a friend he pointed out that it had nothing to do with the above point, but that people would rather see Mena Suvari seducing Kevin Spacey, than Christina Ricci seducing little boys in bathrooms).