enjoyable, thought-provoling, but ultimately a failure

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2006)

American Beauty is an enjoyable and thought-provoking film. However, when I looked closer (to borrow from the tag-line), what I found was somewhat lacking.
Lester Burnham, is, of course, "Humbert Learns". And this is the first failure of the film -- Ball seeks to invoke Nabokov's Lolita, but seems to me to have fundamentally misunderstood it. For while Angela Hayes might as well be Dolores Haze, Lester Burnham is not Humbert Humbert. For where is his Annabel Leigh? For Humbert, his attraction to "nymphets" has its origin early in his life and becomes his life-obsession. Lester Burnham's attraction to Angela Hayes seems to come out of nowhere -- we receive no indication that such attractions have been a long-standing difficulty for him, much less an obsession. (The film does not reveal to us any personal history relevant to this question.) And what is it that Humbert must learn?: How he can avoid his descent into monstrousness? Can he redeem his memories of Annabel Leigh? Or must they torture him, and turn him inevitably to wickedness? But it is easy to learn to avoid the fall when you lack the tragic flaw. It is easy to learn the answer when the question is far simpler.
Although Lester Burnham is definitely not Humbert Humbert -- he is a far less complex character -- he is in some ways Willy Loman. And yet, here again I feel the film fails, not this time in its premises but in its conclusion. As far as I can understand it, in this film, Willy Loman learns by smoking weed, screwing over his boss, quiting his job, buying a car, getting a slacker job, slobbering over teenage girls, and having his drug dealer teach him some vaguely pantheist philosophy. Is that what Willy Loman needs to learn? Is that what Willy Loman did wrong? Lester Burnham ends up dead anyway, but we are supposed to believe that his life was in the end a success rather than a failure? Is this success? Willy Loman, like Humbert Humbert, is a question -- the question of Humbert Humbert they fail to understand; the question of Willy Loman, they attempt to answer, but the answer to me at least seems unsatisfactory.