Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. American Beauty is the seventy-second film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. The turn of the century brought with it a monumental shift in film. New voices, raised on the challenging masterpieces of the 70s, began to emerge and challenge the conventions of their era. Blended tones and questioning authority be a calling card of the time. Dark comedies took the myth of suburban utopia — an image film helped perpetuate — and upended it for a new generation. Sam Mendes in his feature debut, skewered the American Dream with American Beauty. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey in a casting that has aged like milk) is a middle aged man who has achieved everything American society says he should. He has a house with a yard, a lovely wife (Annette Bening,) a well paying job and an angsty teen daughter (Thora Birch.) He’s also miserable. After being dragged to watch his daughter cheer at a school basketball game, he meets her friend Angela (Mena Suvari) and falls into an obsessive infatuation with the girl. Subsequently Lester explodes his life, quitting his job, buying a sports car and smoking weed with Ricky (Wes Bentley,) the son of a family that just moved in next door. While much of American Beauty focuses on Birch’s Jane Burnham, the perspective of Mendes’s film is inescapably Lester’s. Suburbia has belittled and emasculated him and only by rejecting the conformity can this man find himself again. No matter the depths of his depravity, Alan Ball’s script and Mendes’s camera are squarely in Lester’s corner. And that depravity is all but bottomless. Lester is contemptuous of his wife, dismissive of his daughter and, at best, creepy towards the underage girl who frequently stays over at his home. Of course, all of these elements are meant to heighten the delicately maintained garden walls closing in on a man who once saw himself as more than a desk jockey. The provocative nature of the film is the point. It’s all just so off putting. There are moments that work, most of them visual. Mendes has a great eye for staging and the film often places its characters in environments that underscore the emotion of the scene. Spacey’s image is often confined within the frame of something so as to render his psyche imprisoned. Ricky’s surgically colorless room is filled with videotapes mirroring the way his cold demeanor conceals a depth within. If there is one great success in American Beauty it is within that immaculate visual language. There is simply no escaping the harsh and condescending tone. Spacey is actually quite good, even if the character he plays is underbaked. He is intentionally tough to watch as Lester, a dynamic that permeates the whole film. I watch American Beauty and see the skilled filmmaking at work and feel it contrast with the shallowness of what’s being portrayed. Here is a film that has precious little to actually say about contemporary American society, cosplaying as a knowing satire of it. 5/10
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