Best Picture? Hardly! Good Picture? Yeah!

Rating: 7/10 (24 March 2001)

Dark, frequently disturbing and sometimes humourous. Those are the thoughts that jump to mind as I reflect on this picture. "American Beauty" deals with the tragic consequences that flow from the intersecting of the disfunctional lives of a group of very strange people.
The movie opens with a shot of a video in which Jane Burnham (played by Thora Birch in a forgettable performance) wishes for her father Lester's death. Lester then becomes the narrator, for lack of a better word, of the rest of the story. We know from the start how this is going to end. Jane wants Dad dead, and Lester tells us that this is the story of how he ends up dead. No mystery there. As the story progresses we discover that there are various reasons why virtually all the characters in this movie might want him dead, and we get involved in a decent enough who-dun-it.

The movie has its problems, however. I found it difficult to make much sense of the story for most of the 2 hours. Particularly troublesome was watching a movie about a bunch of people who are completely unlikable; you will feel no empathy for any of these characters and you really won't care much what happens to any of them. Having said that, there is, even at those points where the movie doesn't seem to be making much sense, something vaguely compelling about it. You keep watching, even though you don't much care about these people. The story moves along at a good pace and doesn't seem to bog down at all. Annette Benning gives a good performance as Lester's less than lovable wife Carolyn, and Chris Cooper is over the top as Colonel Frank Fitts, the hard as nails, apparently homophobic father of Jane's love interest.
So, there are a lot of good things about this movie. The publicity around it, which focussed largely on the relationship between Lester and his daughter's friend Angela (Mena Suvari), is a bit misleading. That relationship is actually no more important than any of the others to the story, and receives no more screen time than the others. The older man-young girl emphasis seems to me to have been bait to catch people's attention. It worked obviously. "American Beauty" won an undeserved - in my opinion - Academy Award as Best Picture, when it was up against far superior competition. None of that should detract from the fact that this is a decent enough movie, though.
I rated it at 7/10.