The reviewer implies that the following demographic might relate most strongly to the film, "American Beauty":
A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me."
Emasculated men Dysfunctional "family men" Sex-addicted men High-powered businessmen