Damn Fine Flick

Rating: 9/10 (12 March 2001)

American Beauty was the first movie to win the Oscar deservedly quite possibly since Rain Man. Unfortunately, I suspect that the artistic aspects of the film were not all considered in the award. I will admit that the gorgeous cinematography got its proper recognition. However, the underlying theme is perhaps the most powerful aspect of the film, and perhaps the most overlooked.
The key to the movie lies in two things. First, there is the title: American Beauty. Second is the crucial scene with the plastic bag in front of the garage -- described as beautiful. The short monologue there, about how there is beauty in everything, coupled with the title leads us to begin to suspect a connection. And connection there is: the entire movie is about that kind of beauty in the seemingly ordinary. The daily lives of these people, their ups and their downs, blowing around their lives like the plastic bag in that film -- sometimes lifted up to almost beatific heights, touching the sky before they fall back down -- these are the things that make, in the mind of the filmmaker and in the mind of myself, America beautiful. It, like Fight Club is a very Zeitgeist type movie, capturing the spirit of the times in a few hours of film.