Ambitious, but flawed and ultimately pretentious

Rating: 7/10 (9 October 2000)

This movie won best picture?!? Okay, I can understand Kevin Spacey for Best Actor, as he wasn't bad in the movie. But the academy had to be crazy to nominate this for best picture, and - especially crazy - for Annette Bening as Best Actress. Let's start with the movie as a whole, then I'll get to Mrs. Caroline Burnham...
(Mild SPOILERS below...)
It's not a bad idea, though not an original one. Expose the hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies of suburban life, sure. However, the suburban world this paints just does not ring true. The primary reason for this is the simple fact that nearly every character is a stereotype, not someone you might possibly ever meet in real life. The father is the mid-life crisis burnout guy, the wife is the workaholic-obsessive, the daughter is the cynical, disaffected Gen X'er, the neighbor is the militant latent homosexual homophobe...you get the idea. The stock characters turn the whole deal sitcomeque and rather predictable, to the point where I laughed at the movie instead of with it at various parts. Much as I do at B movies, though AB is admittedly technically superior. Some of the writing and performances make me wonder, though...
One of the especially laughable characters is the neighbor's son, who is such a pretentious artiste' that he finds beauty in floating plastic bags. It's meant to be profound and pseudo-spiritual, but ends up being laughably old-hat. It's not such a new idea-Wordsworth and Browning had much the same points, even Solomon if you care to go back that far.
Annette Bening almost rivals Jon Voight of Anaconda fame in her over-the-top performance here...she throws off just about every scene she's in, and it's painfully funny sometimes. I'm not sure if the crazy performance is a result of bad writing or bad acting, so I'm guessing it's a combination. The director should have stopped her sometime. One scene of hers, the one where she's cleaning the house, even reminded me of Creedence's "This is MY houssseee!" line in Troll 2. In case you're wondering, no respectable movie would ever want to be compared to Troll 2.
I suppose I've gone out of the way to accentuate the bad points of this movie, simply because so many say it's so brilliant. It's not, quite simply. I'd merely call it decent, mainly for the fun of watching Kevin Spacey act like a jerk. Definitely undeserving of #5 on the IMDB listing, at the time of this writing. 7/10.