Sex, Truths and Videotape
AMERICAN BEAUTY
As millennium approaches, a great American movie emerges.
With Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Chris Cooper
Written by Alan Ball
Directed by Sam Mendes
American Beauty is a large, bright pink, climbing rose with a simply breath-taking spring display. When trained along a fence with the canes roughly horizontal, the buds form every few inches, sticking up like a picket fence, and then explode in a fantastic display of color. - Peaceful Habitations Rose Gardens, San Antonio, Texas.
IN THIS AGE of cultural saturation, which brings with it a superficial awareness of everything but a true understanding of nothing, there are no simple texts any more. Everything is subtext.
We can't watch episodes of The Brady Bunch without knowing that TV's perfect dad, the actor Robert Reed, died of AIDS. We can't watch Family Affair on TV Land without knowing that darling little Buffy died of a drug overdoes. When Richard Nixon says, "I'm not a crook," we all know for certain that he is. When Ronald Reagan says, "Well," we immediately suspect it's the Alzheimer's. And thanks to Bill Clinton, under no circumstances is a cigar ever just a cigar.
The writer Alan Ball, whom nobody has heard of yet, and the director Sam Mendes, who staged the revival of Cabaret, seem to know this thing about surfaces. With American Beauty, they've created something that's at once completely artificial and thoroughly real.
Their movie is all on the surface in the very best way: Like the tension of a pond that allows insects to walk on water, American Beauty is surprisingly unsurprising. It develops just as you expect it will, and it goes just where you imagine it might. Ball and Mendes count equally on our awareness of how a movie plot unfolds and on our suspicion (or personal experience) about what really goes on behind white picket fences and Venetian blinds.
Mostly realistic (whatever that means), perhaps slightly surreal, with momentary excursions into fantasy, and with no meaning so hidden that the text ever becomes an ambiguous mind game, American Beauty is a remarkable experience, a tightly woven domestic black comedy about suburbia, jobs, kids, parents, adultery, desire, loss, regret, repression and human nature. It's possibly the last great American movie of the millennium and certainly one of the year's best.
You can draw dotted lines (but not solid ones) from American Beauty to kindred works like Blue Velvet, Heathers or Happiness - somber, menacing movies about the mask of respectable "everyday life." But for a more disturbing reference point, consider Badlands, Terrence Malick's seminal film about a serial killer. Mendes opens American Beauty with scenes from suburbia and a man's voice telling us that he'll be dead in less than a year, while the music on the soundtrack plays a haunting melody that sounds suspiciously like the slender theme that pursued Kit and Holly on their killing spree across the Heartland in Malick's enigmatic film.
Marijuana causes many mental disorders, including acute toxic psychosis, panic attacks, flashbacks, delusions, depersonalization, hallucinations, paranoia, depression and uncontrollable hostility. - Scientific American, 1993.
TO APPRECIATE THE TAPESTRY of American Beauty, you'll need to meet all of the Joneses, who live side by side in a neighborhood which, from the air, looks like it survived a conflagration.
On one side is Jim (Scott Bakula), an anesthesiologist, and his partner Jim (Sam Robards), a tax attorney. They jog together in the morning to keep in shape, and they have a perfectly happy, healthy and serene upper-middle-class marriage.
On the other side is Fitts (Chris Cooper), a bellicose Marine colonel who hate fags, believes in structure and owns a valuable plate used by Hitler at his dinner parties. His docile wife Barbara (Allison Janney) keeps an immaculate home and spends her days staring at the wall. Their son Ricky (Wes Bentley) got caught using drugs and spent time in reform school and a mental hospital. So now he minds his manners around Col. Dad and pretends to work as a waiter to pay for his video equipment.
In fact, he's a budding filmmaker and flourishing drug dealer who passes his periodic urine tests by getting samples from one of his clients - a nurse in a pediatrician's office. His father doesn't figure any of this out because, as Ricky tells a friend, "Never underestimate the power of denial."
And in the middle, between the Colonel and the two Jims, there's the Burnham family.
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), age 42, who has worked for 14 years as a magazine writer, begins his days by jacking off in the shower before going to his job in a somnambulistic haze. His wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), who owns pruning sheers that match her garden clogs, and who plays elevator music at dinner, is a real estate agent and a paragon of conformity with a buoyant, cackling laugh. ("She wasn't always like this," says Lester. "She used to be happy.") Their teen-age daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is willful and petulant. A pretty girl, and still a virgin, her best friend is the comely young Angela (Mena Suvari), a sexually promiscuous classmate who intends to become a model, and who desperately fears being ordinary.
Unfortunately, Angela is ordinary in every way. Her sexual awareness began at age 12, during regular Thursday night family dinners at Red Lobster, where all the men in the restaurant would drool over her. She likes knowing that men jerk off thinking of her, and she's especially titillated when Lester stumbles over his words like a love-struck boy when they meet.
Can you figure out the rest? The characters mix it up, and their lives take turns. Lester desires the nubile Angela, who avidly encourages him. Jane meets the poetic Ricky, who videotapes the neighbors from his strategic bedroom window. Carolyn hooks up with the town's cocky super-whiz Realtor (Peter Gallagher), who fucks her like an animal in a seedy motel. And Col. Fitts slowly seethes about what the world has become. Their stories build to a long, tense climax that pretends to make you wonder what will happen. But - at least within a few degrees of possibility - you already know.
Homosexuality is seen by some Freudians as resulting from a failure to resolve the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify with the parent of the same sex. - The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
HOW DOES MENDES accomplish this wonderful movie with such seamless, intelligent beauty?
He begins with Ball's dialogue, which sounds uncannily true to each of its characters, from the chipper, nurturing gay lovers who seem to be joined at the shoulders, to the sardonic observations of Lester Burnham, who finally learns how to win the game of life. Mendes' visual style is distant and still when it needs to be and intimate when the characters deserve it. His music accents the elegant ironies rather than telegraphing emotions. His cinema craft is unusually sensitive in American Beauty - unusual because it's such a departure from what he does on stage.
The acting is the final touch, from Spacey's mordant-cum-ethereal narration, to Gallagher at the pinnacle of his oily licentiousness, to a penetrating performance by Cooper (Lone Star) as a man who can't keep it in any longer. Only Bening seems somewhat too rehearsed in her role, although she plays the movie's most annoying character, which might explain her errant hysterics.
Amid all this turmoil and decay, Ball's beautifully constructed script manages to draw something more than just irony in its title. There isbeauty in the lives of these desperately conventional people, if only they know where to look for it. Lester finally does, although he pays a price for his wisdom.
And Ricky saw it all along: One day, while cruising with his camera, he came upon a white plastic bag being tossed about by the wind. For 15 boundless minutes he videotaped the image of the bag dancing in front of a wall, sometimes ascending the red brick, sometimes just swirling among the dying orange leaves on the late autumn pavement.
So this boy who sells drugs, and who comes from a dangerously insane household, discovers that beauty not only exists, but that we can capture it for eternity. He thus becomes the essence of American Beauty, a movie of almost perfect balance and lucidity about a world gone placidly, tragically mad.