Film

American Beauty

I'm never quite certain what to do with films like American Beauty--the ones that strive to reach beyond the grasp of understanding, the ones that confound. They are difficult and impressive but almost always flawed. Genre movies and silly Hollywood "products" are easy: you always know what you are going to get when you hand over your two bits and your two hours. There is a deep satisfaction in getting exactly what you pay for: a quick roller-coaster, or a good cry, or the fantasy of another life. Often, these pleasures don't even have to be shallow; some of the best movies inspire simple reactions and simple pleasures. There is so much joy in the way Gene Kelly hops and swoons through puddles in Singing in the Rain, or so much tenderness in the way Ethan Hawke sets his arm around Julie Delpy's shoulder in Before Sunrise, there isn't room for anything complicated. How many emotions in life can be so simple, or so pure?

American Beauty is a creature of a different order entirely. It's never simple; it practically revels in its own emotional impurity. There are so many interlocking issues here that it is a nightmare to explain, and even harder to explain away. The film is crossbred from many pieces. Sometimes it feels like a edgy suburban television drama like "My So-Called Life," about the trials of being a teenager and the equal trials of being a parent. Sometimes it seems to be an adult indie flick, in which bizarre actions have a way of seeming less strange when you look at them up close. Sometimes it's just a pitch-black comedy about the mean things people say to each other when they don't care if they draw blood. Most times, also, it brings to mind films like The Truman Show, about characters breaking out of a world--or a life--that has become a prison.

Needless to say, this is film about many things. Mostly, it is about a year in the life of Lester Burnham--father, neighbor, self-hater. Because Lester is played by Kevin Spacey, we can see embers glowing behind his eyes even in the darkly comic early stages of the film when he has hit rock bottom: disdained by his harpy wife (Annette Bening), despised by his daughter (lovely, sad-faced Thora Birch) and distant from his own passions. The highlight of his day, Spacey tells us, is a quiet masturbation session in the shower. "It's all downhill from there." Spacey lets his mouth go limp to show us a broken soul, but the mugging face we see is always that of Kevin Spacey, a man with an extra ace up his sleeve.

Spacey finally plays his hand at a most inopportune moment, at his daughter's cheerleading show, in the form of a rejuvinating fantasy vision of his daughter's sexpot best friend Angela. Burning her way into his mind in a blizzard of rose petals, Angela reignites his sex drive, and soon he's claiming to be a new man: weightlifting, quitting work, bitching out his "joyless" wife for her materialism, and getting the 1970 Pontiac Firebird he always wanted. Because Spacey is such a delight to watch, digging into the material with wit, joy, and not a little smugness, it's easy to miss how cliched Lester's rebellion is. But his wicked renovations are little more than the contents of a stodgy suburban milestone, the mid-life crisis. Lester's voice-overs insist that it is so much more: the rediscovery of beauty in the world, of accessible pleasures. Still, he really does little more than abandon his adult responsibilities and regress to teenage indulgences. Lester's raging at the dying of the light might be a little more poignant if it meant more than rediscovering psychedelia and getting into a coed's pants. Furthermore, Angela (played by the svelte and perceptive Mena Suvari) is nearly as brittle and shallow as Lester's wife. Lester isn't checking out of the race, he's just trading up for a newer model.

Still, the fact that a relationship between Angela and Lester seems a distinct (and perhaps even worthy) possibility is shocking for a movie that is ostensibly mainstream. In many respects, for that matter, this film is unusual in its refusal to play by the rules of Hollywood filmmaking: demolishing the boundaries between adult problems and adolescent fears, and, most significantly, declining to impose any code of morals over its characters' behavior. This is the first movie I have seen in a long time (well, at least since Go) that makes drug dealing seem like an upwardly mobile profession. It's surprising that a film like this would come out of the Hollywood system, which thrives on crafting screenplays in board rooms and ensuring that movies don't get made that haven't been made before. This film, as the not-insignificant buzz has touted, is a miraculously untouched one -- from the script's first charmed appearance on the Hollywood scene (it won over Steven Spielberg, for one) to its realization in film.

This is truly the product of the witty screenwriter Alan Ball, a graduate of sitcom gigs, and the director Sam Mendes, fresh from such theatrical triumphs as the Broadway revival of "Cabaret" and the acclaimed roundelay "The Blue Room." Mendes, working on film for the first time, is extraordinarily self-assured, inspired both with his actors and, more impressively, his camera eye. Fittingly, since the script praises the hidden beauties of the world, this is itself a deeply beautiful film. Its static compositions by Conrad Hall are overloaded with vibrant colors and symmetries that make you almost want to cry. On the surface, Mendes has packed a great deal into this movie, and he maneuvers like a pro through its quicksilver shifts in tone -- from blackest comedy to fiercest tenderness and all the bathos in between. It feels like there is a great deal here, and it's presented with extraordinary ease. I found my reactions changing even as I watched the film unfold. It works like lightning: it never strikes the same chord twice.

What makes American Beauty both so fascinating and troubling is its refusal to play its characters' idiosyncrasies for shock value, and especially its amoral complicity in Lester's lesser actions. The film's tone is strangely gleeful, for instance, when Lester viciously berates his chilly wife.Winning an argument easily with a self-satisfied put-down that sadistically needles her insecurities, Spacey lets a devilish grin sneak across his face as if to say: ooh! that was fun. Trouble is, Lester's target (adeptly played by Bening) is so easy and his blow so gratuitous that one can't help feeling that he isn't being defiant and rebellious, but merely willfully unkind. It would be a little less unsettling to watch if it didn't feel as if the director Mendes got off on Lester's meanness, and expected us to dig it too.

The fact is, this stale groove is just a pose of countercultural shallowness -- mistaking selfish cruelty for an authentic rebellion within the soul. Lester isn't tuning in or dropping out; he's just turning the reins over to his inner selfish teenager. It's a shame, really, that for all its gorgeousness and thoughtfulness, there isn't more underneath American Beauty. After all, as the promotional tagline insists, this is a movie that invites "look[ing] closer." It should, by all accounts, be remarkably subtle. For a time as I watched (from somewhat farther away), I agreed -- snowed by the film's acting prowess, its wit and its elegance. American Beauty seems to be full of big, revolutionary ideas: that beauty is a whole other world behind images, that we create the rules we live by, that we have caged ourselves and can set ourselves free. But, at heart, these ideas are too obvious and too broad to make the film truly extraordinary, or truly necessary. Do we really need to be told that our suburban utopia isn't all it's cracked up to be, that New Age-y beauty can excuse just about anything?