American Beauty (1999)

I don't know why I have waited so long to watch American Beauty, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1999, again. I saw it in movie theaters when it was released and admired it. I purchased the DVD version not long after its release, yet it has collected dust on the shelf until now. Perhaps I thought it was the kind of film that doesn't grow richer upon repeated viewings. There was something precious about seeing it for the first time in a theater, a sense of surprise and admiration for what the filmmakers accomplished. Upon repeated viewing, however, I think I have a more mature response to the movie, and I've come to admire the performance of Kevin Spacey far more than I did the first time I saw it.

Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a middle-aged man who is unhappy with both his job and his family life. His wife Carolyn, played expertly by Annette Benning, has attempted to achieve perfection in all aspects of her life, but early in the film, you begin to realize that she is only able to maintain the appearance of perfection. Underneath, she and Lester both realize how much of a mess their suburban, upper-middle-class existence is. They are, in their own ways, very unhappy despite having all of the trappings that you would expect to make someone happy.

Lester loses his job (intentionally), begins buying pot from the kid next door, gets a job at the local burger joint, starts working out with the hopes of attracting the sexual attention of his daughter's friend (Mena Suvari)--quite a change from the depressing and depressed man he was before. He seems to want to relive his teenage years over again. Carolyn responds by having an affair with a fellow real estate agent, Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher), the "Real Estate King." (Just as an aside, I can't help laughing when she calls him "your majesty" in the middle of their first time together--hilarious.)

Simultaneously, the Burnhams' daughter Jane (Thora Birch) begins a relationship with the pot-selling kid next door, Ricky, who has been released recently from an institution and now spends a great deal of his time videotaping random people. He also films other moments of life, as well, including the famous plastic-bag-in-the-wind scene. Ricky's family life is pretty complicated too. His mother (Allison Janney, quite tamped down here) has apparently suffered a nervous breakdown, and his ex-military father (Chris Cooper, stunningly good as always) is something of a gun nut and quite a homophobe. His greatest fear, other than the possibility that his son is using drugs again, is that Ricky will turn out to be gay. His misinterpretation of what he sees through his window one night leads to some pretty shattering consequences at film's end.

This isn't the first film to delve into the underside of suburban existence and expose it for the falseness. However, American Beauty is expertly made and one of the best exposes of that life. There's a sense of tension throughout the story; you can never tell, for example, when Lester's hair trigger might go off. There are also moments of great humor as well, but it's the anger that Lester feels--and which Spacey conveys perfectly--that stands out for me. When he says, "You don't get to tell me what to do ever again," there's such malice and glee mixed together, I got a chill. His accidental discovery of his wife's affair while working the drive-through of a burger joint is one of the funniest scenes of the film, yet you get a very clear sense of just how much he's going to punish (silently) Carolyn for her indiscretion. Spacey's performance truly pulls the movie together for me, and I guess the rest of the cast seemed to overshadow him the first time that I saw it. Kudos to the Academy for paying closer attention than I did and giving him the prize for Best Actor. (I suppose that's ironic considering the tagline for the movie, "look closer.")

I suppose I could talk about the underlying theme in this film of how we respond to homosexuality. Two of the neighbors are a gay male couple, Jim and Jim (I know, but not that funny), who are accepted by most of the people in the area, but they spark an intense response from Col. Fitts (Cooper) when they show up on the doorstep to welcome him and his family to the neighborhood. There are several times that Spacey's Lester Burnham is "accidentally" thought to be gay. I suppose one could make a case that Cooper's reaction to the friendship that develops between Lester and his son Ricky prepares the viewers for what happens toward the end of the film--and I'd imagine several academics have done so, actually--but it remains shocking to me. I know that the film is trying to juggle numerous issues here, and perhaps I am paying too much attention to just one of the threads of the narrative, but certainly it seems that the ways that we see the world are directly revealed by the ways that we treats others who are different from us (or, oddly enough, just like us). And maybe that's what the film is trying to tell us with its repeated references to homosexuality. It's a mature film in its handling of this subject matter, and that's a testament to the talented writer, Alan Ball, who went on to more fame for writing and producing Six Feet Under on television.