I don’t use the word beauty that often because I don’t need it as much the other synonyms(too obscene to state here). To me, beauty is usually something the museum crowd loves to throw around to describe stuff I just don’t get. But I got ’’American Beauty’’ and I understood the title: it’s accessible to even the dirty, uneducated masses like me. I doubt I can capture this near-masterpiece in words, but I’ll see what my little brain can do.
Kevin Spacey tells the story from beyond the grave. He is a middle-class suburban husband and father going through the motions of his dull, middle-class life. We know that by the end of the story he will be dead. The highlight of Spacey’s day is something many can relate to: jacking off in the shower. His wife, Annette Bening, is an overreaching real-estate agent.Their daughter, Thora Birch, is a teenager who doesn’t understand them, and doesn’t want to.
Spacey hates his job and his life, but discovers he absolutely loves his daughters friend, the eminently lovely Mena Suvari.In Suvari, he sees what he long ago gave up on, and that is a reason to live. So, he begins to reshape himself into something better, something that a slutty teen could like. He quits his fancy job, betters himself by physically reworking his body and mentally unloading all the baggage that the suburbs have packed on. He buys a cherry 1970 Firebird, smokes dope and says exactly what’s on his mind. Meanwhile, Suvari does little to discourage his creepy fantasies.
His daughter Birch has discovered the weird boy next door, Wes Bentley, a voyeur-supreme who videotapes everything in his search for beauty. His father is a retired Marine Colonel, Chris Cooper, who has a piece of Nazi china and can’t stop referring to himself as a colonel. Bentley supplies Spacey with his dope, but Cooper mistakenly thinks they are having an affair and beats the hell out of his son. Bening, meanwhile, is having an affair with the bushy-browed Peter Gallagher, the self-proclaimed real estate king and her idol.
On a rainy night, everyone’s frustration and misery boils over. Spacey is about to complete his transformation from loser to teen sex. Bening is dumped by Gallagher after they are caught by Spacey, and she intends to get even with her husband. After having the crap beat out of him by his father, Bentley decides to leave home and take Birch with him. And Cooper is rebuffed in his advances toward Spacey. In the midst of the ensuing violence and confusion, Spacey finally and momentarily sees the beauty that he, and we, thought was lost.
As an audience, we’re turned around. I went into ’’American Beauty’’ expecting the same-old satire of suburban life, nailing the same old targets. I expected the Hollywood to say that people in the suburbs are boring, conservative and only care about property values, because Hollywood loves saying they’re better than the rest of us. ’’American Beauty’’ plays to this expectation, making the suburbs a sad and lonely place, and then it turns around and shows us, in one instant, an unbelievable beauty and contentment.The final moments of ’’American Beauty’’ show normalcy with such beauty that they made even an ignorant pervert like me get a bit misty.
Director Sam Mendes and writer Alan Ball define the characters as real people without wacky traits, and then they draw the humour out of the desperation of their normalcy.
Kevin Spacey is so human that we understand the things he’s going through and we actually hope for him to improve.
Wes Bentley is fantastic as the voyeur son of the colonel.
The flaws of this movie are almost completely made up for the heartbreakingly beautiful ending. But, after I thought about it, I noticed that many of its plot points turn on sitcom-like devices. Sure, they are handled more gracefully than in any other place.Some examples: the hot teen who’ll screw anything that moves turns out to be a virgin, Spacey catches his wife cheating while working the drive-thru window of a fast food restaurant, and the father who mistakenly thinks his son is having gay sex.
Also, despite the movie’s insistence that there is more to the suburbs than people often assume, it never lets some characters rise above the stereotype. Annette Bening’s real-estate mom is never more than shrill and shallow. The Colonel’s wife is shell-shocked beyond believable terms by her husband’s abuse, and Peter Gallagher never suggests anything more than the typical sleazy real-estate agent.
A strong four stars for ’’American Beauty, ’’ the first film to suggest that folks in the suburbs are worth considering as human beings.