Good, but overrated.

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2000)

American Beauty is a well-written and enjoyable film, but it's strange how most of it's major flaws seem to have escaped the critics' attention. Because the film has gathered so much appraisal, I'd like to comment on it's drawbacks.
First of all, American Beauty's way of treating it's themes is somewhat over-emphasizing and clichéed. I agree with James Berardinelli that the voiceover is completely unnecessary. This is not a children's tale, so we don't need to hear the moral when the story ends. It's far better if we figure it out ourselves. Also, the character played by Wes Bentley (the teenage boy next door) is used in a way which is very typical of American films. He's the wise outsider who sees through everyone and knows everything (see Magnolia for better use of this cliché), and when he says things like "there's so much beauty in the world I can't take it" or "you're not really beautiful, you're ugly" he very much serves the same purpose as the voiceover: to tell the less intelligent viewer what's going on in this film.
Secondly, although the actors do excellent work most of time, they do tend overact; this most evident in the scenes between Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening. This exaggeration is clearly deliberate and though it works most of the time, some scenes just seem to be fishing for cheap laughs.
I might have liked American Beauty more, had I not seen two recent films with similar concepts: Todd Solondz' Happiness (1998) and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997). Happiness deals with the same themes as American Beauty (the pursuit of happiness amongst middle-aged, middle-class people), but is more insightful and far more daring. The Ice Storm, on the other hand, has a surprisingly similar structure to American Beauty(the two neighboring suburban families, and the relationships between the adults and the teenagers), but it's approach to the subject matter is more subtle and less preachy. For these reasons, both Happiness and The Ice Storm deserve four stars (out of four) and American Beauty only three.