Even before you're told the title of the movie, American Beauty has started misleading you, pretending to be a movie that won't surprise you. In the opening narration Lester Burnham, the main character of the film, tells you that he will soon die. Thus the deception begins. You think to yourself at that point that you've got the movie all figured out. You already are convinced you know who killed Lester but not how and why. So you assume that the movie will be a simple mystery in which these details are slowly revealed through a standard rundown of plot points. Your reasoning is partially based on the fact that American Beauty is director Sam Mendes' first film, and that the writer Alan Ball's only other real credit is that he created Cybill.
But you quickly realize how wrong you are. This movie will not be so easy to define, even after you have seen it. It is incredibly dark, yet you leave the film feeling uplifted somehow. It's funny and sad, not quite a comedy but never quite a drama either. And in my experience it is movies such as this one, that are hard to categorize, that are the best kinds of movies.
You will definitely understand early on that the film is not totally plot-driven. The emphasis here is more on character development. Lester (played adeptly by Kevin Spacey) throws a monkey wrench into your idea of how the movie will turn out by deliberately getting himself fired from his job and then blackmailing the company for a year's worth of severance pay. He starts smoking weed and buys a Camaro. We are made witnesses to Lester's mid-life crisis. But his actions are not as significant as his behavior, not what he is doing but why. This exploration of motivation is what the true mystery of the film is, and it slowly unravels before our eyes in a mix of marvelous acting prowess and powerful cinematography.
Lester's changing personality goes beyond a simple desire to experience new things. He senses that he has been dead already for years, and now he wants to live. And just as Lester begins to embrace life, throwing aside and smashing every precept he lives under as he would a plate of asparagus, so too do the other members of his family. The characters and their personalities become the focus, and more and more you forget, at least consciously, Lester's impending demise. You become engulfed in Lester's comic antics, while also realizing the serious side of it too--that you are witnessing a family falling apart.
Wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) is a real estate agent for whom image is everything. She listens to motivational tapes and spouts mantras designed to empower her and help her succeed. As a realist, she knows that her life with Lester is not perfect, but still she pursues undaunted her goal to make it at least appear so. But when her inflexible drive meets with a crisis, she begins to crack. The open house scene, in which Carolyn fails to interest anyone in a house that is less than perfect, and its concluding images of Carolyn in close-up crying and slapping herself are absolutely haunting. Carolyn's inevitable flirtation with real estate king Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher) is to her a natural step up the social ladder, as he represents to her the pinnacle of prosperity.
Daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is going through an awesome amount of angst typical of the teenage years. Somehow she retains a place on the pom squad, even though she obviously loathes the experience. She has lost touch with her father Lester, who genuinely wants to reach out to her but is too inept, and all her mother can do is issue scathing remarks regarding her choice of attire, such as "Are you trying to look unattractive?" Her best friend Angela (Mena Suvari) is equally shallow, talking of nothing beyond her attempts at becoming a model and her various sexual encounters. So when the new next-door neighbor Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) begins to pay attention to her, Jane's natural reaction is to escape her world, which has become totally alien to her, and join the world he has built for himself, even if she finds it creepy and strange initially.
And as we are discovering the depth behind these characters who are supposedly secondary in the story of Lester's life, we delve deep into his psyche through some breathtaking dream sequences that all center upon Jane's friend Angela. In each of these scenes, the sensual symbolism of the visuals are layered one on top of the other. Each sequence concentrates on Angela in the nude but covered with rose petals, some CGI and some real (and in a commendable feat of cinematic magic, you will be hard-pressed to tell the difference). These rose petals could stand for youthful freshness, red conveying the element of danger and sin inherent in these fantasies. Lester lets these pipe dreams lead him toward change, but they are more than just shallow sexual desires he wants to play out in reality. Rather, the true impetus of his change is that the exuberance she represnts is a trait he wants to bring out within himself.
Even the most insignificant of characters surprises you in the end. For instance, both of Ricky's parents, Col. Fitts (Chris Cooper) and Barbara (Allison Jenney), seem to be one-dimensional characters at first, evidenced by the colonel's stereotypical gay-bashing and Barbara's catatonic indifference. But Cooper is not as uncaring about his son's well-being as he initially seems to be. Despite the occasional beatings he doles out upon Ricky, his reactions are out of a confused sort of love and concern. And when Ricky fails to see what lies underneath his father's rage and decides to run away, his mother's comments show a slight understanding of what is going on and why. She does not try to stop him; she is incapable. But there is an underlying clarity there.
Angela too is not what we make her out to be. An early scene portrays her as very superficial indeed when she brags to two girls about giving sex to an influential photographer. When the girls react negatively to this story, she snobbishly calls them juvenile. But their reaction in turn, that she is rather arrogant for having appeared in only one issue of Seventeen and looking fat in that picture, is incredibly harsh, and it does actually wound her. Throughout the film we see her misguided attempts to win her best friends Jane back from Ricky's influence and how much damage the loss does to her already fragile ego.
Eventually when the mystery of Lester's death comes back to the foreground, we have learned so much about the characters that nothing is as clear-cut as we originally thought. By the end, everyone has a motive and the only thing we can be truly sure of is that Lester did not kill himself. He's having too much fun to do that.
This uncertainty is what drives American Beauty beyond its sometimes standard plot of middle-aged indecision and infidelty. The movie is not perfect; it does tread familiar ground, following a plot of family breakdown in the face of sexual tension laid down in The Ice Storm. Lester's continual narration is perhaps a case of less equals more, since most of what he tells us about his character is more subtly played out in each scene. The movie suffers more than a little from trailers that give too much away, such as Carolyn's affair with Buddy, Jane's relationship with Ricky, and Ricky running away. And it is perhaps a bit premature for visitors to the Internet Movie Database website to be saying that the film deserves the spot of number one movie of all time, above Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and The Godfather.
But American Beauty does deserve a place somewhere on that list. It is an incredibly well-acted film, with Spacey and Bening in roles that will be memorable for years to come. The script, though sometimes weak on plot, has some truly outstanding dialogue, chock full of both funny bits and serious moments of character development. The movie, like the roses central to the film's imagery, is beautiful to look at and leaves you feeling a little sad but mostly uplifted. And, beyond the praise from those who have already viewed it, it deserves only one thing more. I desrves to be seen and enjoyed by you.
