American Beauty was director Sam Mendes’ first film and, when released in 1999, was a major critical success. It ended up winning the Best Picture Oscar that year, as well as four other awards, including director, actor (Kevin Spacey), original screenplay (Alan Ball) and cinematography (Conrad L. Hall). The film is an indictment on American suburban life, criticizing its repressive conformity and its attempt to destroy the individual.
Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a seemingly average man who has a standard, boring desk job while his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening) is under extreme pressure to outperform her rival realtors. He also has a daughter named Jane (Thora Birch), who is insecure and falls in love with a new neighbor’s son, Ricky (Wes Bently), as an escape from her parents. Lester is looking for ways to escape his own life. He quits his job, begins working out, takes up smoking marijuana and becomes obsessed with Jane’s egomaniacal friend Angela (Mena Suvari). There is also the problem with Ricky’s father, Frank (Chris Cooper), a military veteran who is disappointed with his son because he is not growing up the way he wants him to. Even Carolyn has some dark skeletons in her closet, like her affair with her rival (Peter Gallagher).
Ball’s free-flowing script gives room for all of these characters to have their own subplots, which becomes costly when it reaches its climax at the end. There are so many pieces that it seems almost impossible that the film is just two-hours, but it is.
Since Ball’s script might be one of the most pretentious I’ve ever seen (I mean, clearly, Ball is trying to make the film as ‘smart’ as possible by putting in ‘hidden’ meanings that he wants you to interpret in countless ways), the key to the film for me is Mendes’ style. I love the look he gives Lester’s fantasies of Angela and the inventive score by Thomas Newman that he uses. The film is extremely stylized, almost going against Ball’s idea that this story could be happening everywhere. It’s almost like it can happen everywhere and nowhere at the same time. What I mean is, Ball is trying to show us that in any suburban area, everyone has secrets, but by placing his characters in such extreme circumstances, Mendes is visualizing a plot he knows really is not possible.
Of course, none of this would matter if Spacey, Bening, Cooper and the rest of the cast were as good as they are. Spacey is easily the best performer here and he needs to be, since the film largely centers on his character. I also love the exotic look of Bently. He just looks out of place everywhere he goes in the film, which makes his performance as believable as possible.
The overall theme of the film might be the question: What really is beauty? Can something as mundane as a plastic bag blowing in the wind really be as beautiful as a woman behind a façade of makeup? Ball and Mendes want the audience to see that anything we want to be beautiful can be, and, in that sense, they do succeed.
Still, American Beauty can be seen as an aggravating film that tries to put meaning into every little thing (the data on the computer screen means Lester is trapped!...the “Look Closer” phrase must mean something) or just the simple, tragic story of miscommunication that leads to a horrific end. Personally, I think that the film wants to be both of these things, which only serves to make the film more confusing. It deserves to be on the list of Best Picture winners (and is definitely better that some of the other films that have won the award), but that doesn’t make it perfect.