Well-polished and painfully smug

Rating: 5/10 (13 October 1999)

In case there was any doubt that suburban life is a brain-freezing chasm of stifled joy and that the well-manicured surface covers emotions that could explode to the surface at any moment, American Beauty comes along to shatter that myth.
The film sets up a typical American family, or at least its idea of one, then lights a match and sets the straw man ablaze, which is all well and fine, if one could discern the slightest message that the film is putting across. If the message is "carpe diem", why does it mock the Kevin Spacey character? Get in touch with your emotions? Something? Anything? There are no real characters in whom the audience can place anything resembling identification.
Well, that might not be true. There is a young man who is charismatic and vaguely disturbed, which means he appreciates Art and Life and Beauty. If he finds Beauty in the Thora Birch character, who is for all intents and purposes a shrill, self-absorbed character, are we supposed to follow suit?
With great pains to avoid spoiling the Big Shocking Ending, which is discernible from a mile away if one squints through the pinkish haze of enough red herrings to threaten Iceland's economy, the message seems to be that happiness is impossible in the sterile, artificial environment. OK, fine. So Kevin Spacey takes a job as a fast food cook (?!?!?...not fine). His wife is portrayed by Annette Bening as a grotesquely repressed caricature, but it seems neither Bening nor the screenwriter gave too much thought to how she got that way. She just is. Deal with it.
There are a couple of good performances in here, sort of, given how unplayable the characters are, namely newcomers Mena Suvari and Wes Bentley (as the Enlightened Oddball Youth), and Allison Janney in a tiny role. Chris Cooper does as well as he can with a terribly written part. Bening has some good moments but brings very little insight to the table; Kevin Spacey is Kevin Spacey.
That said, the movie is not unwatchable, moves along smoothly to the bigger-than-it-needs-to-be climax, and actually does have the guts to follow through on a couple of the themes it introduces. In the end, though, once all the blood and thunder is over, I was struck by how the climax served less as any sort of catharsis, but rather simply as a way to tie up the loose ends. The striking imagery is enough to suggest that director Sam Mendes could make a great deal out of better scripts.