...in the best traditions of black comedy. American Beauty is humorous, distressing, heartfelt, and uplifting.
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Doesn't it help restore your confidence in the movie industry when an unassuming little film comes along and knocks your socks off? "American Beauty" is funny, thoughtful, sardonic, poignant, provocative, horrifying, and utterly satisfying. I could not think of a more deserving winner of the Academy Award for 1999's Best Picture. To say nothing of its Oscars for Best Director (Sam Mendes), Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Cinematography (Conrad L. Hall), and Best Screenplay (Alan Ball). Of course, it's not a film you might want to recommend to your maiden aunt in River City. "The Music Man" it ain't. The movie is quite frank and may well offend many viewers, rated R for sexual situations, nudity, profanity, and violence. But its perceptive jabs at modern dysfunctional families, small-minded bigotry, selfishness, self-indulgence, self-absorption, cruelty, indifference, and bourgeois rage are worthy targets for screen satire. And when the film winds up with as sincere an appeal as this film does to not take life for granted, it makes an enormous impact on one's spirit. Its appearance in an excellent DVD transfer from DreamWorks earns it a clear recommendation.
With his unique style of cynical, resigned, deadpan delivery, Kevin Spacey is perfectly cast as the middle-aged suburbanite, Lester Burnham, who feels himself trapped by family and job, lost and empty. He will die shortly, he tells us at the beginning of the film, but "in a way I'm dead already." Lester's job in the city is a no-win proposition. He is merely a cog in the wheel, a piece of the machine that must produce the right statistical numbers. He is about to be fired. His distant, domineering, compulsive wife, Carolyn, played by Annette Bening, is wrapped up her work as a real-estate agent, a pursuit that consumes her time and energy and at which she is completely inept. Her escapes are a perfectly arranged house and garden, perfectly arranged meals, perfectly arranged furniture, and a perfectly arranged affair with a perfectly arranged real-estate rival, Buddy Kane, played by Peter Gallagher. All of which leaves Lester alone and unwelcome. Lester's angry, rebellious daughter, Jane, played by Thora Birch, hates his guts and hasn't spoken to him in years. Lester can't remember when they stopped talking or when either of them stopped caring. Jane's best friend is a gorgeous and seemingly promiscuous cheerleader, an American beauty, Angela Hayes, played by Mena Suvari, about whom Lester fantasizes endlessly.
Into Lester's neighborhood moves a family even stranger than his own, the Fittses. Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), the teenage son in the family, is a loner, at first resembling a creepy Norman Bates but later revealing himself as the most sensitive, self-assured, and perceptive person in the story. It is he who helps Jane, and Lester, see and appreciate the beauty of the world. Ricky's father, however, is a rigid Marine colonel, Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper), whose emotions become ever more clouded as the movie goes on. Living down the street are a contented gay couple, Jim and Jim (Scott Bakula and Sam Robards), whose presence on the block hardly endears them to the uptight Colonel. The movie suggests that Fitts's homophobic wrath may be a manifestation of his own ambiguous sexual feelings. Ricky's mother, played by Allison Janney, is perhaps the most pathetic figure of all, living in a world apart, dehumanized by the brutality of her husband.
The movie uses much the same symbology as Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose," despite the vast differences in their time and place. The stories unfold in many-layered fashion, much as a flower might shed its petals. As each petal falls, the more is revealed, until in both instances the tales reach a shocking yet exquisitely beautiful conclusion. Lester's turning point comes when he is finally inspired to escape his meaningless existence and become a new man. He quits his job, buys the car of his dreams (a 1970 red Pontiac Firebird), almost drips beer on the furniture, demands different music at the dinner table, begins rebuilding his body, and attempts to seduce his daughter's female friend. Like Hemingway's Francis Macomber, Lester's new life is short and happy. He and we come to recognize what he had been missing all along--the sense of joy in every little moment of being. It's Wilder's "Our Town" for the new millennium. Just as Ricky's explanation of the importance of a plastic bag blowing in the wind touches our soul, so does Lester's closing narration grab our hearts. The movie is guaranteed to grip you, ever so slowly at first, and pull you in, its rewards being new insights at each successive viewing. It is a minor masterpiece on every level.
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