 American Beauty (1999) Visually the movie is fantastic, with incredible cinematography courtesy Conrad Hall (Cool Hand Luke, Marathon Man). The ensemble cast could not be better, with each performance hitting the mark 100%. It's inspired from top to bottom, with challenging subject matter and piercing dialogue. Ultimately, though, it plays off as much wild coincidence and misunderstanding as a typical French farce, with about as much believability. It's too bad, because the characters are for the most part so well-constructed, and so real, that it's a major disappointment for them to ultimately be forced to play out contrivances that would have gotten shot down at writer's meetings for late season "Three's Company." That said, I think about the story a lot, so there is clearly much depth to American Beauty. I mean, I didn't think of the story of Titan AE even while I was watching it. I often wonder if it makes me a bad person that I identify with Lester Burnham, and kind of see him as a hero. This is a guy who quits his job, blackmails his boss so as to ensure financial security, and finds fulfillment in reclaiming the lazy ass approach of his teenage years (when all there was to do was get high and get laid). He lusts after the best friend of his teenage daughter, and buys pot from her boyfriend. Is this an amoral character? I can't tell. When he is running through the streets of his town listening to the Who, or when he submits a brutally honest letter to his boss that states with absolute precision his deep contempt for his job, or when he gets a job at a fast food place just to have the least amount of responsibility possible: I agree with him and root for him. Ricky Fitts, too: he's the moral center of the movie, and he's a drug dealer. How not to think he's cool? Everything he says is exactly what he feels and what he means. Isn't that how we all should be? I fear that all this white male disenfranchisement is quite at the expense of the female characters, though. Annette Bening is given a dynamic role that she does a lot with, but you get the feeling that the bitchiness of her character is intended to be seen as kind of archetypal. Allison Janney's catatonic housewife is about as subtle and nuanced a role as Clubber Lang, although Janney is good in its confines. Mena Suvari could not be more hideous, but Thora Birch is very real. The real trouble is with the Chris Cooper character, who is just totally unnecessary in the first place, but whose prominence in the climax in the film is utterly miscalculated. Because the film tries to go for some kind of convenient Dickensian tying up of all loose ends, it has major faults in the plot that sink what otherwise might have been one of the most left-field staggering pieces of art you'd ever see. The almost sitcom-esque sensibility applied to the plot structure reduces the brilliance of the film, which could have made The Ice Storm look miserably shallow by comparison. But it ends up an Aesop fable when it could have been Italo Calvino. As I said before, though, there is so much good about this movie that it just bears watching whenever it appears. The scene where Ricky Fitts shows Jane Burnham his videotape of a plastic bag floating on the wind is possibly the most genuinely poetic thing I have ever seen in a movie. Spacey is phenomenal as Lester, Wes Bentley is great as Ricky, Peter Gallagher is hilarious, and it's never a bad thing to see Scott Bakula. And anyway, any movie that opens with Kevin Spacey jerking off in the shower is bound to be a classic on at least some level.
Review by Filipino Joe |