Anarchy In The US

Rating: Null/10 (16 February 2000)

Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a man who wakes up one morning to discover he has been in an emotional coma for the last 20 years. That evening he attends a high school basketball game, where he meets his daughter's jailbait best friend Angela (Mena Suvari). She inspires Lester to return to his youthful vigour and completely reinvent his life. This forces his family and neighbours to reinvent their lives. As events become more and more convoluted, Lester finds himself less and less in control of his life...
This film has already been hailed as the greatest of all time even over the likes of Citizen Kane and The Godfather. But is all this praise deserved? Well I certainly think it is. Director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball both make their feature debuts: Ball used to write sitcoms, while Mendes is an acclaimed theatre director, whose most recent success was last year's The Blue Room. Mendes is also British and lends an outsider's viewpoint to Ball's very American story. It portrays each participant as both a caricature and a human being, something great comedy writers excell in doing.
I am running out of adjectives to describe Kevin Spacey's greatness, but now "funny" can be added to the heap. The film's comedy takes almost every form, from traditional (Lester picks up his briefcase and the contents fall out), to wit ("Today I blackmailed my boss for $60,000. Pass the asparagus"), to farce (Lester's neighbour thinks he is paying his son for sex, rather than dope) to very dark satire. The entire cast is outstanding in fact, but the best performance is Chris Cooper's as the afore-mentioned psychotic neighbour, who violently beats his son.
It takes some time after the film to digest everything that has occured and work out what it means. The script shares major similarities with Fight Club (a man rejecting upper-middle-class to violently rediscover himself) and 70's British sitcom The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, which has an almost identical story, several hundred shades lighter, and is a source Mendes himself acknowleges. But whereas Fight Club is about being human, American Beauty is about being as human as possible. It shows that we can learn about ourselves, that we all have hidden depths. Sometimes they are exposed, sometimes repressed, some are constructive, some destructive. But we must never be afraid of them. They make us what we are, who we are.
So what, other than a film, is American Beauty? A comedy, a tragedy, a drama, a murder-mystery, a social comment, a psychological comment... But it is one thing above all others. It shows that we don't really know who we are, and that we really ought to find out. It is a state of mind.