My eccentric but beautiful friend stated, before she proceeded to watch this video in my company, that American Beauty     appeared to be one of the most disturbing movies of all time. During our viewing, she sat cowering in her seat.

My British penfriend told me how brilliant this film was, and how the audience she was with actually stood up to applaud upon the film's end.

My cynical, bitter friend, who suspiciously resembles the lead in MTV's animated series Daria, told me that only people with an utter absence of a life will find something useful or entertaining in this movie.

All of these facts are very interesting, because this proves that just because a film receives much affection at Oscar time does not mean that the masses actually adore the winner. American Beauty was probably the most divisive Best Picture winner in a long time. Many conservative critics decried the win as evidence of a decaying culture, while rabid film fans saw this as a wonderful glitch in the Academy system, which resulting in a "daring", "artistic" picture winning out instead of the usual bloated epic.

The story is about a seemingly normal suburban family in an unnamed town, which in reality is a very unhappy household. The husband (Kevin Spacey) and wife (Annette Bening) do not seem to get along very much at all, while the daughter feels alienated by both of them. Spacey is working at a job (ad man for a magazine) that he is completely bored with, Bening is a real estate agent, and a perfectionist, who cannot compete with the likes of the Real Estate King, and the daughter, like all teenage girls (at least as the media portrays them), is unsatisfied with her looks, even as she is a member of the cheerleading squad.
 

One night, to appease their daughter (they think), they show up for one of the basketball games, and during the halftime show, Spacey becomes completely dumbstruck by the lead cheerleader, a blonde girl who somehow digs into his deepest sexual fantasies. After the game, he gets all giddy in front of his daughter and her friend, like a schoolboy, and later on, fantasizes about her.

The neighbours are also major characters: a kid who was rumoured to have been in the mental institution for two years, and who now spies on the neighbours with his video camera, and his parents, an ex-Marine, and a woman who seems to have some sort of problem which I didn`t understand. The Real Estate King (Peter Gallagher) also shows up, and has an affair with the competition (Bening, that is!).
 

I really didn't know exactly what to make of this movie immediately upon finishing my viewing of it.  I do bet, however, that a lot of the reason some people hate this film is twofold. First, the sexual content of this film is quite strong. Spacey`s character masturbates twice in this film, which must set some sort of Best Performance Oscar record. There is a fair bit of nudity, from all three principal female characters. And, of course, there is the fact of Spacey's desire toward this schoolgirl. But the main reason is no doubt the tone of the picture. American Beauty is not a serious drama, but a satire of suburban life (not exactly an original idea, I must say), which probably threw some people off. Many of the scenes, and some of the performances, border on parody. Good examples include Bening's rendez-vous with Gallagher (their sex scene, and Bening's reaction to it, is insanely over-the-top), and many of the scenes involving the blonde girl, who goes to disturbing lengths to represent the ideal that beauty and sexuality are the only factors in determining self-worth. While none of these performances are actually bad (Bening has some fine moments), some people may believe them to be so, because those viewers were expecting something a little more sober than the result.

But within the satarical framework comes one truly masterful performance, and that is from the Oscar-winning Spacey. He gives a tremendous performance in what is basically an unsympathetic role. His character is a foolish man, who lusts after a sixteen-year-old girl, quits his job, and becomes completely irresponsible, yet Spacey plays it from the heart, and forces us to see his character for his yearning to fill his empty life with something useful. During the many fantasy sequences with him and the girl, we realize how ridiculous they are, but we also see Spacey's absolute fascination with this girl, and the youthfulness and freedom she represents. While it is easy to say that his lust is sick, it turns out that his yearning is to live again, and, in actuality, for much of the film's running time, he is not chasing after her at all, but chasing down a more fulfilling, comfortable life. There are many pieces of dialogue which, coming out of Spacey's mouth, sound just right; even in a scene in which he discusses his youthful days at the burger joint ("All I did was party and get laid."), he does not sound ridiculous, but sounds as if he has lost something truly precious. He also nails the scenes in which he essentially makes a fool out of himself in front of his daughter and friend, and in his confrontations with one of the executives at the firm.
 
 
 

Now that I`ve gotten through the good parts, I will now distress you with the bad, or at least the flawed. The biggest problem is the handling of the voyeuristic neighbour. His presence is not exactly the most original plot device (James Stewart? Rear Window??), but his character has a few twists in that he seems to be a budding filmmaker as well as a voyeur, although in his case his film subjects include the decaying of a dead bird and plastic bags being tossed about by the wind. Who knows, perhaps this kid will blossom into a cinematic genius, but, for now, based on his commentary on the plastic bag, I`m not looking forward to his director`s comments whenever he makes a DVD for his first feature. He's such a pedantic little twerp that I really can't tell why Spacey's daughter would actually fall for him, unless she's thinking ahead to the point where she's the wife of a future Oscar winner.

But here's the kicker. Apparently Sam Mendes actually believes this good ol' boy is actually some twisted giver of wisdom; that beneath all this mental ward stuff and this spying on people with cameras stuff lies a mind of fine ideals. There is a climatic speech of sorts when he states to the blonde chick's face that she is "ugly", because she is so self-centred, etc, and all I was thinking was that you're the one to be talking! You are a sick voyeur, with stalking neighbours with video cameras and selling drugs as hobbies, who lies to his father and appears completely irresponsible, and you have the audacity to call someone ugly for the sin of mere vanity??

Of course, much of why this kid may not impress me is because he does not reach the subtle heights of Spacey's performance. A truly wondrous comparison can be made here, because in Spacey's final narration, he actually recycles much of what the kid says during his plastic bag commentary, and yet everything that I had just criticised as being "pedantic" before is now brilliant coming from Spacey. Spacey sounds utterly sincere and knowing, while the kid sounds like a pretentious dweeb. (There is also, I must be fair, an added level of significance to Spacey's words at this point.)

As well, the voyeur's dad is treated about as well as any knee-jerk liberal would treat him, especially when it comes to his homophobic diatribes, and also his actions at the movie's end. While there are certainly people like this who exist, somehow I do not think the director was trying to paint us a bipartisan picture of the average macho army retiree. No doubt conservatives would have pointed to this portrayal of father and son as part of this film's "sickness".

Overall, then, I am very happy that this very odd film beat out the competition for Best Picture, and that Spacey got his well-deserved Best Actor win. So I will not be one of those enemies of American Beauty. But, for now, I won't give this film the classic film stamp of approval, because I'm not quite sure if this film is truly great. Maybe after a second viewing I will be sure.

Rating: ***½

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