British stage director/wunderkind Sam Mendes steps into the new medium of film and the alien culture of American suburbia
with confidence to burn, shamelessly swiping cinema's most outrageous device, a dead narrator (courtesy "Sunset Boulevard") for the superb "American Beauty." A bit heavy-handed at times (fascist china? aahhh, come on now!) and sometimes steamrolling flat its zesty black humor (see 'The Opposite of Sex' for better handling of dark laughs and
domestic mayhem), "Beauty" still has the focus and lean narrative drive of a good play and a tight focus rare in American films.
Alan Ball's clever,
venomous script dissembles the characters with gleeful malice. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening)
are everyone's midlife crisis nightmare, devoured by mindless jobs and a sterile lifestyle, dead but still walking. Spacey and Bening throw off enough electric energy to light up New York City, but they're playing hollow people. They make the most of the few scenes showing flashes of warm humanity before a sterile lifestyle crushed the juice out of them, but it's not enough to redeem them. This is precisely the point: they've strayed so far, they can't find their way back. Lester is on his way back to humanity, albeit the Beavis and Butthead enlightenment route, when his number is up (I'm not giving anything away here…)
Bening and Spacey are spectacular as a couple adrift. Mendes has a keen sense for the point when absurdity slips into genuine emotion and he delights in pushing scenes back and forth, resulting in
mental vertigo - you're laughing, then it's tragic, but it's funny again, then frightening. There are many scenes where the actors veer from sheer banality to humor to an almost heroic grasping for
connection (Lester talks to Jane in the kitchen, Roy lies to his father about his job). Mendes skillfully
maneuvers the actors through difficult transitions, always keeping an eye to the secrets everyone hides. Everyone but Jane, the only innocent in the film.
Sullen and exasperated, Thora Birch
(who looks like a baby Emily Watson) projects the fatalistic insight of a teen who realizes her most likely future is a dead end, despite all the fancy trappings. She's a cliché – the awkward girl hiding sensitivity and bravery under a plain face – but her emotional honesty in the midst of maddeningly superficial people keeps the movie from spinning into empty lunacy. Her friend Angela Hayes
(Mena Suvari)
is a crass, jaded blonde already headed for a life of minivans and minor adultery. Suvari is smashing as trash-talking, vacuous Angela. She has terrific timing and delivers howlers with a droll wit ("If people who don't know me want to fuck me, that means I have a good shot at being a model.") Angela is the quintessential cheerleader, so annoying you want to smack her. But wait – even she's got an unexpected secret. Angela's key scene is so surprising because Suvari is so good at projecting the nasal irritation of a vain mallrat and turns on a dime to reveal a wistful girl under the Maybelline. Suvari oozes a sleazy, corrupt sex appeal that works very well in the dream sequence contrasting sharply with her disclosure to Lester
(hey! Angela's sequence presentation is stolen from Courtney Love's first layout after she got cleaned up!)
Spacey is again phenomenal, working with fellow stage veteran Bening to
deliver another portrayal of a man who's a little too smart for his surroundings. Both performances are full of telling physical tics: Lester snatching up the asparagus, Carolyn suddenly focusing
on Lester's beer bottle near the couch. Spacey puts such a delicious, self-mocking spin on Lester that you hope he gets away with blackmail and acting like a mindless 16 year old. Bening is just
as good with a much less sympathetic part. Carolyn is a self-deluding pain in the ass, yet Bening shows the desperate drive propelling this woman's scary brittleness. Carolyn's crazed behavior veers
wildly from buffoonery to horrifying, much like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining." Pulling this off at all would be remarkable, yet Bening tears through the role with a roaring intensity --- a
jaw-dropping performance. It's like watching a hurricane tear up the yard, replant it and mix a martini -- at the same time.
Chris Cooper
("Lone Star")
has another tough job playing tightly wound Colonel Fitts. He projects a mixed message behind his fury that isn't explained until much later, but you know he's driven by something right from the start. His portrayal of a man destroying himself and his family because he can't be honest is overshadowed by the sheer explosiveness of Spacey and Bening's fireworks. He'd be getting nominations for his work in any other film. His son Roy is played by
Wes Bentley
with an almost supernatural intensity. Bentley's combination of heat and emotional complexity marks him as a worthy successor to Harvey Keitel. He turns surveillance into an act of romantic longing while fixing the world with an unblinking, unforgiving gaze. Roy is the movie's conscience, the eye who sees past the surface.
Peter Gallagher
is nothing but surface as smoothie Buddy Kane, a vapid egomaniac spouting self-actualization psychobabble who relaxes with firearms. Everyone's so nuts, they could be real people!
Mendes' stage experience shows in the way shots are set up
and creative lighting --notice how the actor's faces are either in shadow or selectively lit, and the artful use of dark shadows
(also seen in "The Graduate"). His visual flair bursts into
dizzy virtuosity with Lester's reverie on Angela and the technology-mediated relationship between Jane and Roy.
"Beauty" is visually polished and technically stunning, with excellent art direction and sharp eye for detail, particularly
costumes. Kudos to Patricia Dehaney-Le May,
creator of Carolyn's monstrous cross between a beehive and an updo (that hair is one of the scariest things in this creep show).
Cinematography
is color-drenched and sharp-edged with a forceful purity of tone. Note how Jane's room is a warm, colorful orange – all the other rooms are either washed-out or ominously dark, and notice the garish, unreal colors throughout the film. Uneven
score is distracting.
Comparisons to "The Graduate" are inevitable – both films
center on youth's desire for honest feeling in a dissolute, nightmarish suburban landscape -- in fact, this movie could be read as a continuation of "The Graduate." Remember the nervous, anxious look
on the actor's faces in the last scene? "Beauty" could be what happens after Ben and Elaine marry and he goes into plastics. "Graduate" and "Beauty" share common themes and visual tricks but
"Beauty" is far more vicious. "Graduate" was satisfied with a few blows to convention's solar plexus. This film takes a sledgehammer to everything in sight.
It's a sad tale of what happens
when a sofa means more than true human connection and the struggle for honesty in a culture that celebrates collection, rather than connection. No holds barred, no prisoners taken, "American Beauty" tears
into the soft underbelly of our self-centered consumer culture and comes up dripping blood. It means to dismember the religion of materialism and does so, laughing. Finely crafted and
pointed as a stiletto, at times slapstick funny and transcendent, "American Beauty" is destined to be a classic. Won't lose much on the small screen. Don't miss this one.
For film fanatics: spot the references to other films by master directors, like "Belle De Jour" (red roses, sexual depravity and Carolyn's painfully understated beige ensembles), "Working Girl"
(Carolyn's high-heeled vacuuming scene)
"Witness" (Jane's display for Roy), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (the shot heard throughout the house), "Lolita" (Angela's last name is pronounced the same as the original Lolita, Dolores Haze) and "Citizen Kane" ('American Beauty' is the name of a rose – which connects to "Citizen Kane" with its enigmatic Rosebud and Charles Foster Kane, echoed in Buddy Kane's last name) And, I swear, fine art – I'd bet money the flying bag video is from – or inspired by – an art film of a paper bag scuttling in the wind.
Surprise credit: Paula Abdul, for cheerleader sequence choreography |
