Very simply, American Beauty is among the best films about the ugly particulars of American existence ever made. It captures the hopelessness, the frustration, the boredom of day-to-day existence - the tensions of familial bonds in that most unnatural of environments: suburbia, and the impossibility of transcendence of the silent economic class system. No sundry suburban topic is left unexamined: sexual frustration, adultery, homosexuality, abuse, workplace stress, the disconnection between parents from their children and of children to their parents.
American Beauty, along with Ang Lee’s fantastic The Ice Storm, are must-sees for anyone serious about understanding what it is to be alive in the United States in the latter parts of the 20th century. More specifically, Beauty & The Ice Storm are two of the better examples of the marriage of script and performance to come from Hollywood in the last decade.
Interestingly, these two examples of what American filmmaking should necessarily strive to evolve towards were directed by an English stage director making his film debut, and a Taiwanese immigrant.
the low down
Lester Burnham - a kind of Jimmy Stewart everyman (the Stewart of Vertigo, not of his Capra films) - played with immaculate brilliance by Kevin Spacey - quits his job and buffs up to pursue a highly inappropriate enamorata.
In its way, Lester’s last few days (the film opens with a voice-over informing us that Lester has died) duplicates Dante’s journey through the divine comedy in pursuit of his own very Lolita-esque Beatrice (15 years old - the inappropriate love interest in Beauty is likely 15 as well).
In both works, the image of virginal perfection appears to the pilgrims as a flower opening - an image that is at once sexual and, in the case of Dante, evocative of Paradise. This kind of close textual reading may or may not be supported by American Beauty - I contend that whether it is or not, the ability to even raise the question of inter-textuality speaks to a depth in this film that bears investigation.
The enduring image of the film is of a video of a plastic bag caught in a wind eddy on a city street. The haunting motion of what essentially is an invisible by-product of a consumer society, caught helpless gusts of whimsy, invisible in plain sight, summarizes the plight of each of the characters in the film.
errata
Compare American Beauty to Citizen Kane in its examination of the American character and the shifting nature of the American Dream. The observations are keen and the words that a talented cast are given to speak are laced with intelligence and weariness. It is the secret language of the upper-middle-class - the cynical aside and the cruel observation employed to mask a fear of emptiness. We are trapped by our debt - by our mortgages and our jobs - by the things that we decorate our homes with. David Fincher’s Fight Club aspires to be an examination of the same themes: the failure of the consumer society in nurturing the soul, sexual frustration and repression, a Nieszthesque will to power fueled by the realization of conformity.
The first hour of Fight Club, in fact, challenges Beauty for the best film of the year. Where Fight Club ultimately fails is in its reliance in the second half on a tired plot twist and the oxymoronic creation of a smartly drilled and regimented army of anarchists.
Fincher’s work does not have the courage to be about the disintegration of the individual in a society that cares little about the individual - devolving into a series of not-terribly-interesting nor well-planned action set pieces that play better in a different film. (Look to David O. Kelley’s’ Three Kings for an example of how to use mayhem as a means towards an intelligent end.)
Fight Club sets itself up to be a stylized American Beauty for people with low attention spans, but ends as a bizarrely disjointed communist manifesto on the evils of corporate America, a love-song for anarchists that have somehow misunderstood the word ’’anarchy, ’’ and a conventional third act reveal of a very weak surprise.
What Fight Club forgets is that we’re connecting and empathizing with the anonymous everyman - we’re not connecting with the last hope for humanity and the leader of millions. In other words, imagine an American Beauty in which Lester Burnham becomes the president of the United States after winning the lottery and you’ve got what’s ultimately wrong with Fight Club.
conclusions
This is not to suggest that American Beauty is not without its flaws. The final cut sequence of a series of characters with motive and ability to murder our Lester Burnham, is a pity. The film should not be reduced to a suspense sequence - it is beneath it. This sequence alone dooms the film to forever be compared unfavorably to The Ice Storm - and with good reason - American Beauty must remain merely an indispensable companion piece to that film. Even so, American Beauty is an example of how cinema, at its best, can evoke an entire range of connective emotion. The last lines and images of the film brought from me an uplift of recognition so fulfilling that I can only describe it as sublime.
The biggest secret of the film is that, at its heart, American Beauty, though clothed in black humor and cynicism, is about hope - its greatest gift is the offering of a key to transcending the daily grind both through it’s final message and just through the act of watching it.
Beautifully conceived, wonderfully scripted, brilliantly acted, American Beauty is so close to a classic already that snippets of dialogue appear to have crept into our vernacular. Even with the imperfections of its third act, there was no better film in 1999. It’s well worth a look.