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THIS
COMMENTARY DISCUSSES PLOT POINTS.
IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE STORY, DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW.
If you want to read the spoiler-free
"report card", click
here.
Another
dysfunctional family
American cinema is preoccupied with
the image of the American family that was sold to us in the 50s...that
"Father Knows Best" model of the dutiful Dad, the perfect Mom, and the
happy boys and girls.
In the 80s and 90s, David Lynch and
his cinematic disciples brought to our attentions to
the dishonesty of that representation. He practically shoved the ugly truth down
our throats. With "Twin Peaks" on television and
Blue Velvet in
theatres, he showed us just how much evil can lurk behind the facade.
The message seemed to be this: that 50s family fantasy is a lie, but
when we understand that everything is corrupt, it's
very difficult to grasp any hope, faith, or love.
This year's Oscar-winner for Best
Picture introduces us to yet another dysfunctional family.
By Sam Mendes'
American Beauty begins, the
happy days are already over. Dad is cynical and depressed. Mom is
burning herself out in her quest to be a professional success.
And their daughter is lost, lonely,
neglected, and she knows it. "I need a father that's a role model,"
complains Jane to her boyfriend Ricky.
She's right. Her father, Lester
Burnham, is a bitter jerk, hardened by days at the office, embittered by
a marriage gone sour, and lusting after high school girls. "Do you want
me to kill him for you?" Ricky asks Jane. Is he joking?
And so begins American Beauty.
"Look closer," says the movie's
slogan. Slowly, the movie takes us under the surface to the lies, the
private sins, the fear and loathing. But even as it
peels back the skin and shows us the cancer, it shows us possible
responses to it. We can become angry. Or rebellious. Or cynical. Or all
of the above.
Or, we can also
look for the roses among the thorns, the beauty in the
brokenness, and respond with beauty and grace of our
own.
Sounds wonderful,
right?
Unfortunately, in
spite of good intentions, American Beauty tells a few lies of its own.
The awakening of
Lester Burnham
We can understand the bitterness and
cynicism of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey). His job sucks. His wife
Carolyn (Annette Bening) doesn't pay attention to him. Their social life
and their sex life are the pits.
So
it makes sense to us that Lester would connect with the free-spirited boy next
door. Ricky (Wes Bentley) is a rebel. He feels
comfortable quitting his job, taking
everything lightly, smoking a joint,
and enjoying life. This philosophical drug-dealing
teenager shows Lester how
to be courageous and spontaneous. Lester is dumfounded. Can a person really live so
recklessly, just do as they please, and get away with it? Is happiness
that simple?
It is the turning point in Lester's
life and, we are led to believe, the beginning of his journey towards
happiness.
So, when he develops a crush on his
daughter's best friend, a high-school cheerleader
named Angela (Mena Suvari), he starts flirting
with disaster. We are led to believe an inappropriate crush is what
lights the spark in Lester's heart. Like Mr. Watanabe
in Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, he's drawn to the possibility of
regaining his youthful sense of wonder, but he goes about it the wrong
way... by trying to possess someone who is out of his reach.
Nevertheless, he gets back into shape. He develops
a wild fantasy life. He starts enjoying himself. The fact that he's
acting irresponsibly as a husband and a father fails to bother him.
Meanwhile, his wife
Carolyn is behaving the
same way. She's frustrated at being a professional failure. So she
starts shooting pistols to let off steam, and she pursues an
extramarital affair to cheer herself up. Her failure as a mother and a
wife doesn't seem to bother her.
Yep, everybody in this story is
carrying dark secrets that bring them some measure of happiness.
Clearly, disaster awaits.
Watching this film, I sensed that the
conclusion could be a revelation. Like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, we
might see characters realize that there are
rules, and that breaking them devastates our own lives and the world around us.
Unfortunately, that's
not where
American Beauty ends up. Whereas Ikiru's
Mr. Watanabe discovers that joy comes through humility and service, the
characters in this film come to different conclusions that lack such
insight.
In the few times I have seen this
movie, the audiences have left exhilarated, wide-eyed, deeply moved.
Obviously, America was touched by this film.
But what have we learned from it?
Let's take the challenge and look closer.
What does it
mean?
In the story of Lester Burnham's
hell-bent quest for happiness, the audience is set up to
cheer for his smug rebellion and his recklessness. We laugh at his sarcasm. We cheer when he acts
irresponsibly. We are amused at his lustful fantasies. We are not given
enough opportunity to be disturbed at what he is doing to his family.
And then, in the final moments of the film, as
Lester draws closer and closer to de-flowering Angela the teenage
cheerleader, things become suddenly uncomfortable. The movie abruptly
admits that, yes, there is a moral absolute here. There is a right and
wrong. Lester does have a moral responsibility.
Yes, Lester does the right thing in
backing away from his long-awaited tryst with little Angela. Yes, it is
good to resist temptation.
But then Lester does something very
very wrong. When Lester turns away from her, she feels humiliated. Shame
overwhelms her. She feels terrible.
And Lester says, "You have nothing to
be sorry for."
If he had said, "It will be okay" or,
"Yes, we have behaved very badly, and let's never do it again," or if he
had said "I'm sorry for my part in bringing us to this place..."
that might have worked.
But American Beauty
shows us characters learning to shrug their shoulders
at their mistakes. In fact, it won't even admit that they're
mistakes.
Lester assures Angela that she is
valuable and special. That's good. She is. The movie has that part
right. But Angela is not innocent. She has made a mistake and has a
lesson to learn. Same goes for Lester.
We should grieve when we realize that
we have acted irresponsibly. We should let our conscience be our guide.
Even Jiminy Cricket knew that.
It gets worse. In the end, as his
daughter Jane finally gets fed up with this family and runs away, as his
wife is driven to thoughts of murder, Lester reaches a state of nirvana,
smiling, sighing, "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
Wrong again,
Lester. When you
find out that you're sick, don't sigh and say everything's fine.
Go get surgery... and then
get on with your life. You're a husband and a
father, Lester. Go out there and try to make things work with your wife.
Confess your sins, ask for forgiveness, and then
start over.
The most blatant example of this
movie's dangerous optimism is still yet to come. When a central
character lies dead, shot in the back of the head, young Ricky discovers
the body. He approaches it slowly and smiles, as though moved by the
beauty of it. The camera impresses upon us that yes, this is the lesson.
Even in murder there is beauty.
Perhaps one can find beauty in such a
spectacle. But when a person's initial reaction to the bloody murder of
a good friend is to smile and sigh at its beauty...
get that man to a psychiatrist! Grief and horror are a natural and entirely appropriate
reaction to evil, just as we should all be thankful for pain, because it
tells us there is something wrong.
Phillip Yancey writes about the
problem of pain with great insight. He talks about how the disease of
leprosy robs its victims of the gift of pain. Because lepers can't feel
pain, they often don't realize when they are causing themselves injury,
and they suffer irreversible damage. To me, the climax of
American
Beauty is encouraging us toward a sort of emotional leprosy. Ricky
gives us no evidence of pain, grief,
or horror at the death of his friend. He
smiles, gets up, and runs away... a hero
for inspiring others to acts of irresponsibility.
A double
standard
Strangely, American Beauty gives
Lester permission to do what he wants, to shrug at his mistakes, to go
on smiling. But it doesn't extend that privilege to others.
Audiences cheer when Lester goes after
his goals. But when Carolyn goes after her own selfishness and sleeps
with another man, we are led to celebrate and laugh and cheer when she
gets caught by Lester, who again gets to deliver the winning sarcasm.
Audiences hate
Ricky's dad (Chris Cooper), the nasty ex-military
conservative next door, when he himself is making the same mistakes as
Lester... self-righteously pursuing control of his own world. (In movies
of moral anarchy, the liberals always cry "tolerance,
tolerance," while demonstrating intolerance for conservatives and making
them out to be the enemy.)
Acclaimed film critic Pauline Kael
asked in exasperation, "Can't liberals see that this movie sucks up to
them at every turn?"
Pushing the
audience's buttons
American Beauty has an ironclad
strategy for pleasing American audiences. First, it appeals to our
cynicism. Then it appeals to our self-interest. And finally it appeals
to our sense of morality. If you say you don't like this movie, you're
in all kinds of trouble. Like another Best Picture winner, it shows that
all of life's problems can be fixed with a simple change of perspective.
"Forrest Gump" implied that life's difficult conflicts can be solved
with simple platitudes and and ignorance of life's complexities. You
made enemies fast if you said you didn't like the movie. American
Beauty implies that we can be happy if we just focus on the positive,
beautiful things and ignore, or worse, deny, the disease.
Evil, it suggests, comes from conservatives.
At least Forrest Gump had a heart for
serving others, loving others, and was rather selfless. I give him
credit for that. Lester Burnham is not an advocate for selflessness.
He's a champion of ignoring the real problem. Sure, he makes one
decision that shows he has some shred of decency. But the audience has
been encouraged to celebrate, to laugh, to revel in all of his selfish
maneuvers along the way. And so the audience goes home happy, having had
a great time.
Okay, it has a muddled message. But is
it art?
American Beauty does have its
virtues.
Master cinematographer Conrad Hall
makes this fairly typical American neighborhood very easy on the eyes.
The soundtrack is effectively
restrained.
And there is an impressive,
breakthrough performance by Wes Bentley.
But this movie is hardly original.
From television's "Roseanne" to "Married With Children", America is
doing its best to convince itself that there's nothing wrong with broken
relationships. If these messed up families are fun to watch week after
week, then we can feel better about our own problems. When David Lynch
and Ang Lee deconstructed the typical American family, you could sense a
genuine grief at the problems there, a longing for people to do the
right thing, to be good fathers and mothers, to save their families.
"American Beauty" uses the same devices to expose the evils, and then
just smiles while it all goes to hell.
Director Sam Mendes seems worried that
we won't get the film's message. The narration from the very beginning
of the movie, and the big speeches of each character along the way, tell
us what it all means so we're sure not to miss it.
I would offer briefly (without making
this review any longer than it already is) seven points about its
artistic flaws.
1. It compromises its own narrative
structure. If Lester Burnham is telling the story, how does he know so
much about what went on in the neighbor's houses behind closed doors?
2. Too much time spent sharing
Lester's sexual fantasies. Okay... Lester has a crush on a high-school
cheerleader! Enough already. We get it. Do we have to watch him
fantasize about her, over and over? And in slow motion? This film will
likely inspire more pedophiles than it discourages,
assuring them that they have "nothing to be sorry for."
3. The performances. Many are
calling Spacey's performance Oscar-worthy. He is good at playing the
jaded rebel with a smart remark for everything that comes his way. But
is this much of a "performance"? It's not that much different from the
demeanor of his character in LA Confidential, and there's even a bit
of his Usual Suspects turn in there as well (in his metamorphosis from
a slouch on the couch to a confident athlete.)
Annette Bening as Lester's
success-or-bust wife is certainly enthusiastic. But she swings a little
bit too drastically between campy Lucille-Ball-funny and the I'm-Gonna-Get-Nominated
melodrama.
To show how evil Ricky's conservative
ex-military father is, Ricky's poor mother, a silent, battered, and
repressed woman, is played by Allison Janney like a zombie out of
Night of the Living
Dead.
Some of the performances are
commendable, especially Bentley as Ricky. The always-impressive Peter
Gallagher seems determined in each movie to come up with a more
outrageous hairstyle than his last movie. But these performances belong
in different films... a drama and a satire.
4. The profound speeches are jarringly
inconsistent with the rest of the characters' dialogue. I couldn't
imagine Spacey's speech at the end coming out of the mouth of his
wisecracking Lester Burnham. See if you can. It sounds like a passage
out of "Deep Thoughts" or a Hallmark card.
5. Is it camp, or is it realism? Early
scenes portray the Burnhams and their neighborhood with such
exaggeration that one can imagine the neighborhood from Edward Scissorhands right around the corner. 45 minutes later (specifically,
in the scene where Lester meets Ricky), the movie's tone changes. The
characters suddenly become real. The neighborhood quits acting like a
cartoon. And the mean-spirited satire backs off for a more contemplative
tone.
6. Unnecessary
nudity.. Hey, if the camera lingers on the
nudity of under-aged girls for the sake of "realism", why does the
camera avoid male nudity? And if the filmmakers want us to view Lester's
lust for a minor as wrong, why does the camera ogle
at this
cheerleader's naked body, while the storytellers
steer around any acknowledgment of the consequences of such pursuits?
Conclusion
American Beauty does have some
important things on its mind. I would agree with some of its
exhortations. Hang on to your youthful lust for life. Do this by seeking
all that is beautiful, and by telling the truth in everything.
But I would add... do so carefully,
and with love. If American Beauty had shown the importance of this, it
might truly have been the year's best picture.
Just one year earlier, The Ice Storm
accomplished what American Beauty did not. America didn't notice the
best movie of 1998.
Jeffrey's Rating:
C+
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