This morning, I woke up to an accusation on social media that I shouldn’t write a review for American Beauty because the person on the other end felt that I would be incapable of looking at it indiscriminately. The sentiment of this comment boiled down to a concern I addressed about the subject matter, the lead actor, and some troubling information that had come out in the years since this film released in theaters. I was not previewing my thoughts on the film, only addressing what a lot of people had already mentioned about those things shortly after the allegations against Kevin Spacey came out. I commented back that I had no intention of letting those things color my opinion on the film and that I would be fair to it, judging it on its own merits and not on more recent issues.
That being said, there is still a level of ickiness to the whole film because of the subject matter that would be there even if the most straight-laced, family-friendly, America’s Dad actor were cast in the lead role instead of Spacey. Would this film be any less problematic if Tom Hanks was in the lead? He could probably pull off the role, though we would probably not want to see him do it. By having Kevin Spacey, who already played characters with shady moral compasses, in the role, we don’t have someone whose later career is filtered through the prism of a single distasteful character, let alone many distasteful characters.
And that is Kevin Spacey in a nutshell. He has played decent characters in the past, but, like someone like Ray Liotta, he is known more for the disdainful characters, the villains, or the scumbags. What we are seeing of him in American Beauty, playing a character named Lester Burnham, is the deplorable father figure, a man who is burned out on the American Dream even though he is the beneficiary of it. He has a successful wife, a family, a nice house, and a good car, things that many people in this country can only dream of. Yet he is unhappy in all aspects of it. He fights with his wife constantly, seeks physical pleasure outside the marriage bed—our introduction to him is him pleasuring himself in the shower—and hates his job. He narrates his own story and tells us in the opening shots that he will not make it out of this film alive. He will remind us of this a few times throughout, just in case you forget during the journey.
Two important plot points kickstart the narrative. First, a man is hired at his work that is there to downsize redundancies. This starts with a meeting and a request for Lester to put in writing what he does for the company and why he should be kept on. While he is sarcastic about his work, he does need the job, and this kind of meeting would throw anyone off. The second thing that drives this narrative is when he attends a sporting event where his daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), is cheerleading. During the performance, he notices Jane’s best friend, Angela (Mena Suvari), also performing.
We are taken into his point of view where everyone else fades away and he is seeing her alone, performing for him. Suddenly this awkward cheerleading routine that is in no way sexual becomes hyper-sexual as she unzips her shirt to expose her breasts to him, but the salacious imagery is covered with an outpouring of bright red flowers, one of many visual themes director Sam Mendes uses throughout. Later scenes will have him imagine her on the ceiling of his bedroom, barely covered in rose petals as they rain down on him, or sitting in a bathtub filled with those same petals.
His fixation on this teenage girl becomes a driving point in the changes in his life, a mid-life crisis sex fantasy that extends to him quitting his job but using deceit to gain a very favorable severance package, and for him buying a nice car that he had always wanted, though we never actually see him driving it. It also drives him to start lifting weights and jogging because he overhears Angela comment to Jane that she would sleep with him if he were in better shape.
The film doesn’t stay focused just on Lester, though. We also see things from the rest of the family’s point of view as well as others. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is a status-obsessed realtor who is overly critical of her husband and daughter. This has led to a lack of intimacy with Lester and a sharp decrease in her daughter’s self-esteem. This has also led her into an affair with married real estate “King” Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher). She threatens to divorce Lester only to realize that because he supported her through school he would most likely be awarded half of her income should they split up.
Jane is feeling undesirable and compares herself to Angela, who is always bragging about her various sexual escapades as well as intentionally stoking the fire about Lester’s obvious infatuation with her. Meanwhile, Jane is drawn to her new neighbor, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), a socially awkward teenager who seemingly films everything with his handheld camcorder and also sells pot on the side. Ricky and Lester meet at a gathering, and he begins to supply Lester with marijuana. Ricky’s father, Col. Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper), is a hard man who always identifies himself by his rank, has no tolerance for his son, routinely drug tests him, and is openly disdainful towards their two other neighbors, the openly gay couple Jim Olmeyer (Scott Bakula) and Jim Berkley (Sam Robards). With all this testosterone-fueled homophobia on display, it isn’t much of a surprise that Frank has a secret that will eventually come out in the end.
The American Dream can be summed up with the image of a nice-sized home in the suburbs, a job that you don’t hate and pays you enough to live comfortably, and a nuclear family. All these things have soured in the Burnham family. No one is happy even though they have all of these things. People are going through the motions while secretly they are miserable. At one point, Lester flaunts a passion for his wife in front of others at a social gathering, a passion that doesn’t really exist. He’s putting up a façade that masks how there is no love left between these two. Both he and Carolyn actively pursue extramarital affairs because of their deep unhappiness with each other.
This is an ugly film on purpose, showing us the darker sides of human nature and how we can ultimately work towards our own destruction. That self-destructive mindset ultimately leads to a scene that nearly derails the entire picture because it just doesn’t quite ring true. Lester eventually ends up in bed with Angela, but he changes his mind and doesn’t have sex with her when he learns that she is in fact a virgin, contrary to the front she has been putting on all this time. Realizing that she has been feigning her sexual experience, he cannot go on with this encounter. It would have played out so much better had he seen a picture of his wife or daughter and felt shame for the way he has been lusting after Angela. Instead, it just feels poorly justified.
Alan Ball, the scriptwriter, was primarily known for being a sitcom writer at this time. You can see that to a degree in this film. There are several moments that feel like setups for a joke, specifically later in the film when Col. Frank is seeing interactions between Lester and his son Ricky. These are staged in such a way as to deliberately make it look like something is happening between the two men like we are setting up for a comedy of misunderstandings. That, coupled with Frank’s over-the-top hatred for gay people, plays like a scene from a sitcom. Alan would later take some of these themes and ideas and mold them into a new show, Six Feet Under.
While the film heavily focuses on Lester, it is really Annette Bening who steals the show. She is rigid and unpleasant when dealing with her family, but we get just a moment, during an open house, when we get a peek behind that front she is putting on and see just how overdrawn she really is. We won’t get a look at that side of her again until after she has been caught in her affair and facing the realities of what that would mean in a divorce court. Annette is one of the best actresses we have these days and finds a way to take this deeply harsh character and give her some genuine sympathy. Surprisingly, while she was nominated for the Oscar, she ultimately didn’t take it home.
I remember when I saw this film in theaters back in 1999. There was an elderly couple sitting in the row in front of me who had obviously chosen this film based on the title alone. About an hour into this film, I hear the woman turn to her husband and say, “This is American Beauty?” Not long afterwards, they got up and left, obviously disturbed by the film’s content and tone. The title is satirical and more than a bit sarcastic. It’s also apt. Lester, upon meeting his end, comments in his closing narrative that, despite being dead, he is finally happy, having found beauty in the world. This line can be interpreted many ways, as can most of this film for that matter. This is the real American Dream, and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
I won’t justify the controversial elements of this film in light of later revelations about Kevin Spacey. That is not this film’s fault any more than it is a call-out to its first-time director, Sam Mendes. You can go back through the oeuvre of Woody Allen and find ways to tie it to his controversies, too, but that would do a disservice to the art rather than be a legitimate attack on the artist. His life choices don’t and shouldn’t reflect on the films that he was involved in. This was a film that went against the norm and told a daring, somewhat disturbing tale of suburban life and the bitterness of the American Dream, but it is also endlessly compelling and doesn’t go where you think it ultimately will despite the ending being spoiled to a degree in the opening voice-over. For that, it won the Best Picture Oscar at the 2000’s ceremony, cementing it as one of the greatest films in Hollywood history in the eyes of the Academy. Plenty of people will find fault in it and wish it had never won that evening, but after nearly thirty years’ distance from it, returning to it was refreshing and a reminder of why it had such an impact back in the day.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks (won)
Best Director: Sam Mendes (won)
Best Actor: Kevin Spacey (won)
Best Actress: Annette Bening
Best Original Screenplay: Alan Ball (won)
Best Cinematography: Conrad Hall (won)
Best Film Editing: Tariq Anwar and Christopher Greenbury
Best Original Score: Thomas Newman
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Release Date: October 1, 1999
Running Time: 122 minutes
Rated R
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Allison Janney, Peter Gallagher, Mena Suvari, Wes Bentley, and Chris Cooper
Directed by: Sam Mendes
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