Best Picture: #72
Original Release Date: October 1, 1999
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Director: Sam Mendes
Quick Impressions:
Here’s some good advice.
If you’re feeling bad about yourself as a parent, watch American Beauty. One of my most time-intensive hobbies is ruminating over my inadequacies as a mother. My six-year-old recently got the idea to celebrate Halloween by making the inside of our home look like an abandoned haunted house. Conveniently, this will involve no additional decorating. I keep my house Halloween ready year-round. I can’t keep things picked up. I never make anything for dinner but soup and tacos. For some reason, my son still believes that when you die in heaven, you go to space. I berate myself about all of this (and more!) every day. And then I watch American Beauty and think, “Wow, I am the mother of the year!”
Often I worry, “It’s so hard to be a good parent!” Then I watch American Beauty and realize, “No, it’s not!” Love your kids. Show interest in them. Talk to them. Listen to them. Do not creepily lust after their friends. Don’t buy drugs from their boyfriend. Try not to insult them at random moments. Don’t hit them in the face. Don’t call them names. If you suspect they’re gay, don’t beat them up, have them thrown in a mental institution, or kick them out of the house in the middle of the night. (Even if you don’t suspect they’re gay, don’t do that stuff!) And one more time, just as an additional reminder, do not have sex with or buy drugs from their teenage classmates. (It’s really not even okay just to undress their teenage classmates and hover over their naked body appreciatively, not even if you make them a snack afterwards. That doesn’t make up for anything.)
Watching this really helped me get some perspective. I love my kids. I’m a really nice mom, actually. I don’t know what these parents’ problem is! Why did they have kids? They don’t seem to like them. And they appear to hate each other…and themselves! This is one of the most dysfunctional groups of people I’ve ever seen on screen together. I kept remembering the film Ordinary People and thinking, Yes, those were ordinary people. What is wrong with the people in this neighborhood?
When I first saw this movie, I was twenty (about two months younger than Mena Suvari, who plays Angela). Now I’m forty-two, just like Kevin Spacey’s Lester Burnham. Age has changed my perspective (though I remain two months younger than Mena Suvari). This movie was less alarming when I was young, possibly because the three teen characters are all vaguely sympathetic. Originally, I thought, “Well, Lester’s going through a mid-life crisis, but he’s not such a bad guy.”
Yes, he is. Lester is a bad guy. (Now it’s a good performance. Despite some of the more unsavory aspects of Kevin Spacey’s personal life, he is a good actor, and I do think he deserved the Best Actor Oscar he won for this. He’s very funny.) Lester’s one of those characters who sometimes seems not so bad because 1) He’s so funny, and 2) He says out loud what we’re sometimes thinking to ourselves. (He’s also deceptively sympathetic because everyone else in the movie is kind of awful, too.) But if we focus on what Lester does instead of what he says, he really is pretty bad. His thoughts are relatable. His actions are troubling.
I saw American Beauty three times in the theater (with friends at college, then my roommate and her cousin, then my family). (My mom hated it! And my grandma was so offended she refused to finish watching.) But I’ve never enjoyed it so much as when I watched it with my daughter. She was vocally outraged by everything that happened, reassuringly disapproving of every instance of alarming behavior, and so, so, so enraged by the ending. Watching with her made the movie one-hundred times better. (Now she wants to watch it again with her older brother since it has just the sort of baffling, frustrating ending that always comically infuriates him.)
The Good:
The characters in this film are so fun to think about. But they’re awful! (The character dynamics are both a strength and a weakness of American Beauty. Is it really necessary to make the people treat each other this badly? Isn’t there some needless sensationalism at play here? Isn’t the film going out of its way to dwell on what’s shocking? I’ll come back to these questions later.)
Whatever its flaws, American Beauty is fun to watch because the characters demand (and hold) our attention. You look at the Burnham family and think, “How could any three people possibly be more dysfunctional than this?” And then you meet the family next door!
The question I kept asking myself over and over again is why are Lester and Carolyn even married? Clearly they hate each other! I keep thinking back to Ordinary People. Calvin and Beth Jarrett love each other. They’re both flawed, and they’re suffering from the sudden death of their son, but you understand why they’re a couple in the first place. Why are Lester and Carolyn together?
(“He told us why,” my daughter said when I brought this up after the film, “it’s because she used to fake seizures at frat parties. If she still went to frat parties and faked seizures and was under 24, he would still like her. What he likes in a woman hasn’t changed. It’s his wife’s fault for not remaining under 25 for the rest of her life.”)
Lester and Carolyn hold each other in such contempt. The degree of their disdain for each other seems bizarre in a married couple in about-to-be 21st century America. I’m Catholic, and I just want to yell at them, “Get a divorce!” Why would anyone choose to share their life with someone they so openly despise? (This movie makes me feel one-thousand percent better about myself as a wife, too. Usually I sigh, “I’m so difficult to live with!” And my husband says, “You are not!” but I don’t entirely believe him. And then I watch American Beauty and realize, “Oh, you’re right!”)
When I was younger, I remember preferring Lester to Carolyn (largely because I could empathize with his exasperation with life, while I found her materialism revolting). Now, however, I watch and think, “You know, Carolyn’s not so bad.” (For one thing, she’s married to him! That excuses a lot.)
Here’s the thing. If either my husband or I behaved the way Lester and Carolyn do, the other of us would say, “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Maybe you need help. What can I do to help you?” That’s how people who love each other behave. These people hate each other! Not only are they not supporting each other, they’re actively rooting against and sabotaging each other. The marriage is so toxic!
As the movie opens, Lester is vaguely sympathetic. (At least, I thought so in college.) He’s unhappy. He appears to be depressed. He’s definitely having a midlife crisis. But then he gets this idea that since the world is unfair (and it is), then he’s allowed to disregard all rules and behave however he wants. This is very bad. If he were married to my husband, he would never get this far because when he kept complaining about his job again and again, my husband would listen to him and notice something was wrong. And care. Carolyn, on the other hand, only listens for opportunities to put Lester down.
I remember the first time I watched the movie, it cracked me up when Lester’s supervisor asks him, “Hey, Les, you got a minute,” and then he smiles and says, “For you, Brad, I’ve got five.” He’s kind of pushing it with the sarcasm there, but he still leaves a tiny bit of room for Brad to choose not to notice his tone.
But the way Lester quits his job is concerning. That’s the way people fantasize about quitting a frustrating job. When you start acting that way in real life, there’s a problem. Writing a report that burns all bridges as he leaves his job is a bad idea. Extortion is a crime. (It doesn’t matter that life is not fair or that his employer is terrible. It is not okay to threaten to falsely accuse someone of sexual harassment in order to force them to give you money. That’s just wrong in every possible sense.) As the story goes on, Lester keeps doing things that are funny for the audience, but not funny at all for the other characters. He shows open contempt for everyone in his life, in kind of an aggressive way, too. As a viewer, it’s easy to be amused when he pretends to passionately kiss Carolyn in public. But it’s not funny for her. He’s humiliating her at a work event. (Watching this scene, my daughter asked, “Is this why crazy women always smile like that because their husbands are weird like him?”) The audience can also feel uncomfortably amused as he openly ogles Angela, but imagine how his daughter must feel (not to mention Angela herself)!
Lester’s obsession with Angela is right at the heart of this movie, and it is the biggest thing that makes American Beauty so much more disturbing to watch as an adult. I mean, imagine this story from Angela’s point of view. For weeks, her friend’s forty-two-year-old father has been openly leering at her, clearly lusting after her. She plays it off as a joke and tries to enjoy the attention. (Clearly she does enjoy the attention, but we never see her have positive interactions with anyone but Jane who appears to be her only friend. If she reacted instead by saying “Your dad’s gross,” and ostracizing Jane, she would then have no friends herself.) Then one night, her only friend turns on her, insults her, and runs off with her stalker (who also insults her, telling her that she’s ordinary). For comfort, Angela turns to the adult man who’s been obsessed with her all this time. She lets him undress her. Then, when she’s already naked, and he’s hovering over her, he decides at the last minute that he’s not interested, after all. So he takes her into the kitchen and makes her a snack, asks her about his daughter, and seems so disturbed that (despite everything that has just happened to her), she feels compelled to ask him how he’s doing. Then while she’s in the bathroom, he gets shot, and then his wife comes home and starts screaming. Sometimes I think I’d like to see the film remade as Angela’s Bad Night. For whatever reason, at the end of the movie, Angela is the one character I find myself most curious about. I think it’s because I like the way Suvari reacts to the gunshot, and I wonder, “What will she do now?” The rest of them seem a little bit boxed in, out of choices.
So no, Lester is not really a good guy. But to the film’s credit, it shows us quite clearly the harm he is doing to the other characters. And it does not silence his lusted after teen cheerleader. Angela is actually my favorite character in the film, and she always has been. I think that’s largely because the idea of a middle-aged man constantly fantasizing about a teenaged girl is such a midlife crisis cliché, and a lot of times when we get this scenario dramatized, there’s not much to the girl. She’s just there to be the object of lust. But Mena Suvari makes Angela hysterically funny. (The character may not always be in on the joke, but the actress is. She seems more like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch than just some interchangeable teen thrown into the part. The movie is much more entertaining because we get to see Angela react to Lester’s inappropriate obsession with her.) Angela is not always a great friend to Jane (to say the least), but some of her lines crack me up so much. (It’s easy to see why Jane would like her. She’s funny, often puts others down, and obsesses over her appearance and what others’ think of her. She’s like a composite of Jane’s horrible parents.)
Thora Birch’s Jane is sympathetic, too. My daughter found Jane the most sympathetic character in the film “because she’s the most normal.” Jane really seems to hate her parents, but when you see how they treat her, it’s kind of hard to blame her. (I’m unclear why her parents don’t seem to notice that she’s their child, not their roommate. They complain about her teen angst but respond to it as if they’re adolescents themselves which is pretty baffling since they both express distress that she doesn’t like them.) And her boy-next-door love interest Ricky Fitts is also incredibly sympathetic—on paper. (Wes Bentley’s performance is perhaps a touch off-putting in its creepiness. I’ll talk more about that in a minute.) Watched in a certain way, American Beauty is a touching love story about two abused children who appreciate what’s good in each other. (Anyone would agree that Ricky lives in an abusive home. Not everyone would agree that what Jane’s going through is abuse. Watching as a younger person, I thought she was simply treated badly and ignored by parents who had no room for her issues because they were so focused on their own. Watching as an adult, I thought, “I would never treat my child that way.” Jane certainly deserves better treatment than she gets.)
On this watch, I even found that I sympathized tremendously with Annette Bening’s Carolyn. When I was younger, the character’s materialism really turned me off. I remember arguing with my mom about Carolyn. The scene when she slaps Jane and talks about how she lived in a duplex at her age is very telling. You know, I told my daughter that my mom used that scene to defend the character to me, but now that I think about it, I am not so sure that I wasn’t the one defending the character to my mom. (The reasoning used sounds more like mine than hers.) We do see clearly in that scene that Carolyn tries to show she loves her daughter by giving her superior material things. Upon reflection, I think I was the one defending Carolyn, after all. I don’t know why! I couldn’t stand her!) I still don’t exactly like Carolyn. But she’s just so unhappy, and she’s trying so hard to make things better. (Plus I felt compelled to remark to my daughter, “You know, people get mad at me sometimes for being too messy, and I think it’s equally cruel to be mad at someone who can’t be messy. Obviously the issue is not the couch.”) Bening is pretty funny in the role. Her sex scene with Peter Gallagher is certainly memorable. (I know the horrified reaction it elicited from my daughter is something I will never forget.) I do feel sorry for Carolyn because it seems to me that her life would improve if she left her husband (and he refuses her suggestion for a divorce, threatening to take her precious money from her if she tries it). Surely she would be happier with someone who shares her values and hates her less.
The humor of American Beauty is pervasive enough that I enjoy the movie every time I watch it, even though I remain aware of its flaws. (It is usually funny, occasionally horrifying, and extremely fun to watch with someone who reacts to it as dramatically as my daughter did.)
Sometimes its visual aesthetic feels…less than subtle, but if you like the color red and the idea of watching through windows and screens, then this is the film for you. It also has kind of a Rear Window quality, this idea that Ricky’s voyeuristic video-making and everyone’s parading in front of open windows seems so unsettling, and yet we’re all eagerly watching a movie that allows us to peer into people’s private lives. The score is pretty good, too, even though the main theme is a little repetitive. (Lately, I consider the main theme of everything repetitive, so I wouldn’t trust me on this if I were you.)
Also American Beauty has a certain energy that Shakespeare in Love (the previous year’s Best Picture winner) lacks. I find that strange because that film has a more focused story to tell that progresses consistently and goes somewhere. This film just heads towards Lester’s death—which I guess can be taken as a metaphor for the human condition—but its individual scenes seem to have more energy and better pacing within the scenes.
Best Scene Visually/Best Action Sequence:
It’s not subtle, but I like the moment when we watch Ricky’s dad beat him up through his TV screen. This gives us (and Jane) great insight into why Ricky loves filming images he finds beautiful. We see what he’s trying not to see or think about, what happens when the camera is turned on his own life. I also like the moment when Ricky ignores Angela’s dancing in front of the window and zooms in on Jane’s face.
“What’s the best scene visually in American Beauty?” I asked my daughter just now.
“That bag,” she answered sarcastically. (She’s very contemptuous of the plastic bag and does not see the beauty in it herself.)
Best Scene:
Based on the amount of discussion it generated between us, I’d say the best scene is when Lester gets an opportunity to have sex with Angela late in the film. (“That can’t be the best scene!” my daughter tells me now. “It was evil and infuriating.” But we’ve talked about it so much, and every time we talk about the movie, we seem to go through it all again.)
My own personal favorite moment in the movie is when Jane makes a fairly reasonable request of her friend (asking her not to have sex with her dad), and Angela responds, “Why not?” That never fails to crack me up. That Jane even has to make such a request is already so ridiculous. The fact that Angela asks like Jane’s the one who is being crazy and unreasonable by saying this just always makes me laugh so hard. (This is not really an important part in the film. It’s just my favorite part. Angela is really not a good friend at all. If my daughter hung out with someone who treated her like that, I would be so concerned. She is, however, a very funny movie character.)
I also sort of like the scene when Ricky films Jane, and she asks him to kill her dad. It’s so exasperating that he turns the camera off just before she says she’s kidding.
The Negatives:
The thing that bothers me about American Beauty is that it’s so contrived and manipulative and eager to delight us with the shockingly awful behavior of its characters. Contrary to the film’s tagline, if you look closer at American families, this is not always what you find. (In fact, is it ever what you find?) I will grant that people are not perfect. But usually real people are complex in messy, unexpected ways. This doesn’t feel like natural, realistic, messy complexity. This feels engineered and lacking in nuance (and, to a degree, lacking in compassion, as well). The Burnhams hate each other’s guts. Why? (Sometimes I think the most honest answer is, “Because it’s funny!” Sometimes I have trouble believing this film is trying to be an exploration of anything. It really feels more like a showcase for Kevin Spacey’s sardonic line delivery, which is fine. He is very funny. Mena Suvari is funny, too. And so is Annette Bening.)
My daughter kept yelling at the screen, “Be functional! Why are these families so dysfunctional?” Must the characters be as dysfunctional as they are? As I watch, part of me wonders, “Is this actually insightful, or is it just assuming the worst of everyone for shock value?” Again, I think of Ordinary People. That story feels truer than this one. Usually, when marriages fall apart, there’s a series of events and a whole tangled jumble of reasons. Lester and Carolyn, were they ever happy together?
And the family next door is particularly frustrating to me. As a rule, both Chris Cooper and Allison Janney are good actors, but I don’t think their characters get enough development here. (The performances are still good, but they’re so frustrating!) He seems like a cliché, and she’s lacking in…everything. Honestly, I’ve never understood Allison Janney’s character. I mean, I get the idea. Her husband is a self-loathing control freak who can’t accept that he’s actually gay, denies his sexuality, represses his personality, takes everything out on her, withholds affection, expects perfection, dishes out punishments. You know what it is? They feel like stock characters instead of specific, particular individuals.
Just now, my daughter volunteered, “I think a certain flaw of the movie is that Ricky’s dad is just homophobic, but he has no other traits. In every scene he’s in, the movie is like, ‘Wait until you see this.’ And it’s just him being homophobic again. And then at the end, the movie is like, ‘Surprise! He’s gay!’ and you’re like, ‘Yes, I got that two hours ago. Is that really all?’ His character just doesn’t go anywhere unique.’” I’m adding her thoughts here because we’re very much on the same wavelength about this and hadn’t even discussed it .
On the other hand, she likes Ricky. “He starts out like an antagonist, but then he turns out to be surprisingly sweet, just someone who’s been hurt but who appreciates when things aren’t bad.”
I like Ricky, too, but I’m frustrated with the way the film presents him. We watched this movie with the captions on, and when I went back to check that I’d heard something correctly, I realized that reading Ricky’s lines silently improves them. Some of the things he says truly are if not profound then at least lovely. Plus poor Ricky! His father is abusive in multiple ways. He’s coping with his life as best he can. Considering his circumstances, he’s doing rather well, and he does appear to care for Jane sincerely. But it’s hard to appreciate the value in what he is saying because Bentley plays the character in such a creepy way. He stands too close. He never blinks. His behavior is inappropriate (all the stalking, I mean), but it’s really his mannerisms that make him seem inappropriate. (“That’s what I feel like when I talk to anyone,” I confided to my daughter, “Like that’s how I worry I come across, ‘I was just staring at you. I find you so interesting.’”) Meanwhile, she was horrified that Jane kept responding to his overtures so positively. “Ohhh!” she wailed at one point. “There are so many layers of discomfort here!”
In terms of their circumstances (their age, their lives at home), both Jane and Ricky are incredibly sympathetic. And in a way, it’s quite romantic that he is the only person looking at her and makes her feel seen for the first time. On the other hand, their behavior is off-putting. You can’t exactly be happy for her that she’s found love when the overtures he’s making are often so inappropriate. She seems to need love so much, making her especially vulnerable. Fortunately, the person who has found her is a disturbed but caring boy-next-door, not someone’s creepy forty-two-year-old father. Still, their relationship has an unnerving edge. And the movie doesn’t offer any happiness or hope for them. I know in the original ending (that never made it to theaters), the two are blamed and put on trial for Lester’s murder. That ending would feel odd and tacked on, yes, but as it is, the movie lets them find each other, then never gives them anywhere to go from there. This is the one relationship in American Beauty that offers the promise of something better and has the potential of working out. Ricky and Jane have the complexity we would expect from real people. But the movie ends before they’re allowed much growth, and it’s hard to root for them as a couple because their plan of running away together doesn’t seem entirely sound.
In fact, it’s hard to root for anyone in this story. As I mentioned earlier, I personally like Angela (though I can’t deny she is a horrible friend to Jane. She’s right about one thing, though. When you’re seventeen, it’s probably not the best idea to run away from home with the first person who shows interest in you.) (Actually, it’s less that I like Angela than that I think Mena Suvari is funny.) I also see hope for Carolyn. I don’t share her goals, but I’m sure someone does. To me, throwing yourself into your work, finding a hobby, even having an affair, these all seem like more encouraging choices than those the other adults in the movie are making. (They set the bar pretty low.) She’s not exactly doing good things, but most of the things she’s doing are not that bad, and at least she’s trying stuff. (Of course, she is toying with the idea of shooting Lester, but fortunately, she never gets the opportunity.) I feel like a year from now, Carolyn’s life might be looking up, which is very much not the sense I get from the other three main adult characters.
And yet, the character the movie leaves us with is Lester, as if we’re meant to sympathize with him. My daughter was furious about that, too. She ranted about it for some time. The thing is, the turn American Beauty takes at the end is so sudden. We get the sense (or at least my daughter and I did), that Lester has realized the true beauty of life just seconds before dying. My daughter does not feel he has worked hard enough to deserve this epiphany. She was also upset that the film seems to want us to sympathize with his character, to commend him for “doing the right thing” with Angela in the end.
“So what are we to take from that?” she complained. “Are we supposed to think he’s a good guy because at the last second he doesn’t have sex with her—even though he creepily took off all her clothes and hovered over her? You shouldn’t get points just for being nice to her now.”
“And is that being nice to her really?” I jumped in. “He hits on her like every time he sees her, but then on the day her friend insults her, he waits until she lets him completely undress her, and then he tells her he’s not interested. He could not pick a worse time to be less creepy. I mean, he couldn’t do the right thing in a more offensive and damaging way.” (That’s the thing—whatever makes him change his mind, it’s not truly consideration for Angela. What he has done to her is damaging enough.)
“And then he makes her listen to his problems,” she said.
“And he makes it clear what he really wants is to learn more about his daughter,” I added, “but he doesn’t tell his daughter that! So he traumatizes two girls!”
“He traumatizes everyone he comes into contact with,” she said, “like seventy-five percent of the characters in the movie. But then suddenly life is so beautiful. I don’t think these random late revelations redeem him. And why is he remembering stuff he wasn’t even there for?”
“When we die,” I joked, “we all see the plastic bag.”
She got directly to the heart of the matter when she said, “The movie suddenly pushes so hard this idea that he’s secretly nice and his life is good that I didn’t know if it was trying to be serious or to make fun of itself! All of a sudden, we’re supposed to think he’s a new person, having these pleasant ideas? And then nothing happens from that. He’s just dead. You get one face from everyone, and then it’s over!”
She’s right. It’s extremely hard to tell just what exactly the point of this movie is. As I said to a friend recently, American Beauty is definitely entertaining, but I always get the sense that 1) It’s sending a strong message. 2) I don’t know what the message is. 3) It doesn’t know what the message is either.
When I was twenty, I remember coming away with the idea that Spacey’s character was searching for something missing from his life and finally found some enlightenment right at the very end. And I thought, “At the moment that he died, he was a better person than most people realized.” But at forty-two, I’m very distracted by the fact that 1) He spends so much time obsessed with the idea of sleeping with a teenager. 2) He completely ignores the needs of his own daughter who is also a teenager.
I’m actually all for love. Could someone forty fall in love with someone twenty? Absolutely. Could someone forty fall in love with a high school student who is also their daughter’s best friend, while at the same time completely ignoring their daughter’s needs and without having any meaningful interactions with the friend? Well…I feel like if you’re even asking yourself this question about your own life, you need an intervention. (I cannot even imagine thinking right now, “You know, there’s something missing from my life. Maybe I should start sleeping with one of my kids’ friends.” When I was a teenager, this kind of thing seemed less objectionable. (I could always think up hundreds of excuses for adults in particular circumstances.) But now that I’m the adult, I’m not just horrified, I’m baffled.
My daughter ranted, “And after he’s put on Angela’s clothes, and she goes to the bathroom, and then he looks at the picture of Jane when she was little—isn’t that kind of creepy? Like, ‘Aww! I miss my daughter!’ She’s in the house still!!! And she doesn’t like you because you keep trying to sleep with all her friends.”
A friend of mine pointed out that Lester makes the decision not to have sex with Angela, after all, after learning she’s a virgin, which is true and hard not to be bothered by. For one thing, it’s hard not to read that as, “What? Well in that case you have value!” or “Taking your virginity would harm you,” as if starting a sexual relationship with your daughter’s teenaged friend would not harm her in any event.
A more charitable reading is that Lester discovers she possesses innocence, the quality he’s been seeking to recapture all along. And so he can’t take it from her. He knows how precious it is because he’s been trying to recapture it himself. But what really bothers me is that Lester suddenly becomes so attentive and gentle. He starts behaving in an almost—I don’t know—fatherly way.
“Suddenly he’s very caring,” my daughter noticed.
Sarcastically, I said, “If only his daughter were more sexually attractive to him, maybe he could be more nurturing to her and take an interest in her life!”
There’s something just so frustratingly selfish about Lester, right up to the end.
Overall:
American Beauty is compelling and entertaining. I’d happily watch it again anytime. (Well, maybe not any time. Before this watch, I hadn’t seen it for twenty years, and I had never really noticed that.) I do find the movie funny and fun to watch with the right companion, but I also find it not as deep as it seems to imply that it is. It’s a flawed film, but one that’s especially great to show to friends who get animated and yell at the screen when characters do alarming or improbable things.