Review:

*** ½ (out of ****)

Starring:

Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scot Bakula, Sam Robards, Barry Del Sherman

Director:

Sam Mendes

Screenplay:

Alan Ball

Length:

122 min.

MPAA Rating:

R (For strong sexuality, language, violence and drug content)

The typical male mid-life crisis takes a decidedly bizarre twist in Sam Mendes’ debut film American Beauty.

Leading a rather talented cast, Kevin Spacey stars as Lester Burnham who has the perfect life. From the outside, everything looks normal and well adjusted. Inside, things couldn’t be worse. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), loves her roses. She prunes and cares for them like she doesn’t her family. She’s absorbed in the world of real estate to the point of obsession and her family is often left behind because of it. Their daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is going through the awkward teenage years and takes the typical tack of disliking her father and rebelling against his and her mother’s rules.

The model of dysfunction, the Burnhams are thrust into turmoil when Lester begins lusting after Jane’s cheerleader friend Angela (Mena Suvari). He quits his job and begins working at a fast food restaurant, much to his wife’s chagrin. She finds comfort in the arms of rival realtor Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher) but vocally objects at one of their typically silent evening meals.

Meanwhile, Jane has become interested in the boy next door. Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) is an amateur filmmaker whose infatuation with a wind-tossed plastic shopping bag seems ludicrous, but on reflection is symbolic of the lives of the people in the film. Inert at the start of the picture, the various events in their lives blow them into new and unusual paths, each one divergent from the previous and all leading them to unexpected destinations. It’s the metaphor director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball want you to find and you’re all to glad to accept it.

One of the most aggravating things about films like American Beauty is how fallacious they feel. While individual events in the film are completely believable, when bundled together in such an outlandish way, they almost become cartoonish. That doesn’t mean that the film is bad. On the contrary, it makes the film incredibly interesting. It’s a compact vehicle for an examination of a wide variety of personality traits.

What films like this need is an empathic connection for the audience. American Beauty does so in a number of ways and the foremost of which is through the film’s second least likely character. Carolyn is almost villainous in her approach to parenting and spousal duties. We dislike nearly everything she does. Throughout the film, we’re convinced that she couldn’t care less about her husband or daughter. We honestly believe she cares nothing for anything other than her precious roses and her realty career. Bening grants us these images with such flair and credibility that when she finally comes to the end of the picture, we realize how many nuanced clues she has left behind from the beginning. We cry for her character even though we thought we never would.

That Spacey’s character fails to earn the kind of empathy one might expect is a flaw in his performance. Some might find his ultimate conclusion heart wrenching, I was left feeling somewhat unconcerned and, had Bening not given us so much prior, we might not have even felt what we did. Instead, thanks to Bening, Spacey’s performance feels more helpful in that denouement than it really is.

Birch and Bentley are better than Spacey in their respective roles and help the film along immeasurably. Suvari wasn’t spectacular, nor even as good as Birch, but held her own opposite the more experienced Spacey. Chris Cooper rounds out the cast of central characters as the self-hating ex-marine Col. Frank Fitts, Ricky’s abusive, disciplinarian father. What could have amounted to a leering, vicious character the likes Jeremy Irons or John Malkovich would have created, becomes a conflicted character in Cooper’s hands. That our opinion of him softens slightly by the film’s end is a credit to his subtle work.

American Beauty for all its flaws is an accomplished film. The performances make the film far more than it might have been otherwise. Additionally, Mendes could have directed the film down an even more ludicrous and absurd path but restrains it just enough to keep the audience engaged and accepting of its themes.

Though many other films have tackled this kind of subject matter better, namely Ang Lee’s exceptional The Ice Storm, American Beauty is still an enlightening experience.

-Wesley Lovell (January 2, 2007)