Shallow and overwrought

Rating: 5/10 (11 June 2000)

Moviegoers must be suffering from some kind of pre-millennium fatalistic malaise to mistake "American Beauty" for a work of depth. Written by Alan Ball who produced CBS' "Cybill," this movie shares with the sitcom that contempt for anything outside its own narrow sphere of values. What's worse is this time around Ball tries to pass them off as universal. Its basic pieties are embodied by one Lester Burnham (played way over the top by the sly Kevin Spacey), and we are asked to trust that his newfound "freedom" (Burnham quits his thankless job of 14 years after blackmailing his employer for a year's salary and benefits.) is an example for his control-freak wife (Annette Bening in an embarrassingly overwrought performance) and maybe the rest of us anal-retentives in the audience to follow and quit wallowing in the worship of things and missing the point about the meaning of life. Question is did it ever occur to Ball that there are a lot of us out here who manage to experience the beauty that life has to offer, even when we still sit squirming over where we are going to make the next mortgage or car payment? I don't expect a Hollywood insider like Ball has to worry about that, and Lester Burnham uses blackmail to avoid the money-grubbing trap that's caught the rest of us poor 9-to-5 lunkheads. Is it any wonder that Burnham's daughter (Thora Birch) is mortified by her father's behavior? The movie languishes over his getting wistful over her underage confidante (Mena Suvari) so unabashedly, that the same queasy feeling you had when Woody Allen was eying Mariel Hemingway up and down in "Manhattan" overtakes you all over again.
Why was it necessary that Burnham declare himself spiritually dead, and, hence, poetic justice that someone complete the picture he has of himself? This is the same kind of morbid nonsense some of us had to sit through when Mike Figgis and Nicolas Cage were indulging themselves in "Leaving Las Vegas." Actually, I know why. It's a way of gathering sympathy for the main character and having a made-up tragedy wake up the other characters who despise him to change their minds about him. It's so obviously manipulative and such raging self-pity, I can't believe so many people are buying this stuff.
This is a Dreamworks production which explains the supposedly happy male homosexual meighbors Jim and Jim, but they seem such a shallow depiction of suburban ideals that the goodwill feels like a backhanded compliment. They are just part of the problem that's burning Burnham's hambone. And Chris Cooper whose performance could have been this movie's hallmark is thrown away for an ending that, if gays were really thinking about it, is not just a tired idea but a subtle insult.
It's Wes Bentley's guarded but unflinching gaze that's the real beauty. It surpasses even Ball's video conception of those fleeting moments when life holds you spellbound by its serendipity. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have Conrad Hall behind the lens. The man who capitalized on what most of his peers threw out outdoes even the most fastidious of them with some of the most fluid yet controlled camerawork in a movie released last year. Still, as good as it is, it doesn't take away from the dilapidated yarn this movie is weaving. The story actually diminishes some of the visuals; and he might have garnered an Oscar, but director Sam Mendes didn't notice that he needed to rethink some of the plot and character development and presentation. The camera movements do get a little monotonous. The only thing that didn't need rethinking is the score by Thomas Newman and others which plinks and plunks a seductive chord as it carries us gingerly through the course of the movie. It almost makes you forget that the bloom on "American Beauty" has long fallen off the vine (The moment I noticed it was with Carolyn clipping roses as disinterestedly as Martha Stewart.) and that all you have to look forward to in it, if you reject the death wish lurking underneath it, is abject resignation to, as Lester might put it, our stupid little lives.