Important movie, but it's still trash

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 2004)

I respect the significance of a film like American Beauty, but when people start babbling on about getting great deep things from it, it really gets my back up. For the uninitiated, American Beauty is another one of those "let's blow the cover off middle-class suburbia and expose the yuppies for the disturbed, demented, unhappy, pathetic losers they truly are" movies, sort of like "The Graduate" for our times. In fact, the filmmakers are guilty of the same sort of hypocrisy they profess to satirize.

I always have a big problem when filmmakers set out to expose middle-class life, then depict every single character as a neurotic or an aspiring nutcase. The truth is, American Beauty is no more an accurate depiction of suburbia than "Father Knows Best". If you were to show suburbia as it truly is, you have to show the characters as so empty and so mind-numbingly boring the audience would either walk out or fall asleep. But then again, isn't that the reason suburbanites flock to the movies in the first place, to escape their private humdrum?

I won't rehash the whole movie, but on the finer points: since the story is told from the point of view of Kevin Spacey's character, everything he does is presented as heroic; when he shrewdly scams his corrupt employer for 60 grand then spends it on a hot car, or leaves his dull office job to work at Burger King (because he likes it), we're supposed to cheer him on, as we would a rebellious teenager. Which is fine, except this guy has a home and a family and a mortgage, and he's neglecting all of them. Selfishness is cool. Then when he gets a chance at sex with the high school kid he idolizes (that's rape, by the way), he thinks better of it and refrains. This is supposed to be Spacey Doing The Right Thing. It is not. It is Spacey Not Doing The Wrong Thing (if I refrain from committing murder, can I get the key to the city?). Annette Bening's character is presented is bad because she's materialistic and a shrew. When she and Spacey attempt to make love on a sofa, she frets because he might spill his can of beer on it and ruin the upholstery; this puts the ki-bosh on he whole affair. But isn't a lot of what she stands for just simple adult responsibility (disguised by the filmmakers as kooky fanaticism). Neither of them are good parents to their daughter; Spacey doesn't care, Bening only postures at caring, but at least she puts an effort into posturing.
There are so many ways to pick this movie apart, because it touches people on so many levels, but what are the filmmakers trying to say? It seems like they're espousing the old Timothy Leary mantra of tune in, turn on and drop out. Just start a little Haight-Ashbury behind your own picket fence and everything will be all right. The irony about their idea of "exposure" is that audiences aren't embarrassed by it; that is, they don't feel "fingered", as it were. Instead, they respond in the most positive ways; they relate to the characters or they'll say "I know someone who's just like that" (even I know someone who's a lot like the gay Marine colonel) . Maybe one day someone will come along and expose the filmmakers, these so-called truth-tellers as the stupid shallow cretins THEY are. I would guess that they consider teens and young adults as its target audience, because only someone who hasn't lived would be a sucker for this trash. American Beauty is a trashy movie, reeking of pot smoke and glorified rape fantasies. 2** out of 4