The closer I look, the worse it gets

Rating: 6/10 (5 February 2002)

I first saw this in theaters back in 1999. I loved it. I really really loved it. I've seen it four or five times since, and each time, I like it less. I just saw it again a couple of days ago, and I stopped it before it was over. At that moment, I decided to sell my DVD. It has now been excised from my DVD Collection, about which I have considerable pride.
The main reason is that I have come to feel very strongly that this film doesn't know what it wants to say. It takes a bunch of characters, constructs various relationships between them, and sets them loose to run around for two hours, at the end of which, what have we learned?

I've heard lots of people make comparisons between this film and another highly acclaimed movie of 1999 which I hate: Fight Club. Both films include philosophically flimsy but highly entertaining critiques of materialism. With Fight Club, the critique on materialism is made by the character who turns out to be the villain of the piece, who seeks to replace it with fascism. In American Beauty, the anti-consumerist is, first of all, a total hypocrite, and second of all, has a life changing epiphany the moment before his death, but never gets a chance to expound upon what that epiphany was.
On the hypocrisy charge, consider the oft-quoted scene when Lester Burnham (magnificently portrayed by Kevin Spacey) yells at his wife Carolyn (played in an over-the-top caricature by Annette Bening) for placing too high a value on material things, in this case, a sofa. Fine. He makes a good point. No one else seems to have noticed, however, that this is precisely the same scene where it is revealed that Lester has bought a 1970 Pontiac Firebird. Since we at no time see Lester enjoying the use of his car, the implication is that possession of the object is a good in itself, which is the very apex of materialism.
There are lots of other things that we don't see, and I never noticed until I "looked closer" how conspicuous they are in their absence. We never see Angela or Jane don a cheerleading uniform after their initial cheerleading scene. They never make any reference to being cheerleaders. The whole concept of cheerleading, then, is merely a mechanism (and quite a contrived, not to mention cliched mechanism at that) to introduce Lester to Angela.

I also noticed, when I looked closer, how painfully bad much of the dialogue given to the younger characters is. "Lame-o" "Geekboy" "Take a whizz" It's just horrid. And why, exactly, was Jane looking at a breast augmentation website? First of all, her breasts don't appear to need augmenting (when I saw this in theaters, I thought she must want to reduce her breasts, but upon looking closer, the computer monitor clearly says "augmentation", which means a process of adding to).
The worst flaw of the film, by far, is the fact that we have one horrible cliche repeated twice in the space of minutes in the final act. The homophobic marine turns out to be a repressed homosexual, and the slutty cheerleader turns out to be a virgin. For the love of God, who let those two howlers slip through. Bad enough that either made the final cut, but both?!! It defies understanding.
The scene that made me turn the film off, this final time that I watched it, was the scene were Jane and Ricky decide to run off together. I was never very comfortable with this scene, because, call me conservative, I'm just not thrilled about a girl dropping out of school at the tender age of seventeen (or so) and running off with her drug dealer boyfriend. But what really got my goat was when Ricky ridiculed Angela by calling her ordinary. Fair enough, Angela had it coming. But for Ricky to not only accept Angela's principle that ordinariness is bad, but to use it against her... that bothered me. Ordinariness or lack thereof is not a valid criterion for judging the worth of a human being. Ricky, having been set up (clumsily) as a heroic character, shouldn't have descended to such a twisted and hateful principle.
The whole film has the feel of having been made up as it went along. It is radically different from how it was originally planned to go. The prelude sequence and the scene later in the film which it foreshadowed have become utterly pointless since the removal of the subplot about Jane and Ricky being blamed for Lester's murder. Now, that subplot is a bit ridiculous, and was cut for a good reason, I agree. But why leave the set up if you're cutting the payoff? [Notice that Ricky shuts off the camera before Jane says "You know I'm joking, right?"]
The sequence where Col. Fitts spies on Ricky and Lester is straight out of "Three's Company." Fitts sees just enough to draw the conclusion that the writer wants him to draw, and nothing else. That's a classic example (and the most blatant I can recall from any film) of bad, contrived plotting. What exactly was up with Mrs. Fitts? Presumably, her scenes meant something in some previous, unreleased version of the story. The initial meeting between Lester and Ricky is built on numerous coincidences... Ricky just happens to be working there, and he works there just long enough to meet Lester!!! And what self-respecting drug dealer would give a man $2,000 worth of merchandise on the assumption that he'd be willing/able to pay for it later? It would have been more contrived if Lester happened to have $2,000 in cash while jogging, but "I know you're good for it" isn't much better.
This film is ambitious. There are lots of individual pieces of greatness in it. There are a lot of really good ideas. But on a fundamental level, it just doesn't work.