# American Beauty (1999)

### reviewed by
James Sanford

    AMERICAN BEAUTY (Dreamworks)
    Directed by Sam Mendes

There have been plenty of other movies about the shallow values of suburbanites, but few have been as consistently -- and bitterly -- funny as "American Beauty," a fairly astonishing debut film from British stage director Sam Mendes. In the same way Chinese director Ang Lee found fresh perspectives on the 1970s in "The Ice Storm," Mendes takes a commonplace setting and a familiar-looking cast of characters and twists them into frightening, fascinating new forms, with a considerable amount of assistance from screenwriter Alan Ball (another first-timer) and a superb cast.

The premise of "Beauty" won't strike anyone as particularly revolutionary, and, in fact, the film initially seems like it's going to wind up as an updating of "Lolita," or worse, a send-up of the now-dusty Amy Fisher scandal. Instead, it reveals its inspiration to be "Sunset Boulevard," the seriocomic 1950 shocker about the quest to recapture lost youth through an utterly futile love affair.

"Beauty" delights in confounding our expectations again and again, letting us make assumptions and then shattering them moments later. In the blissfully boring homes that line Robin Hood Trail, where most of the action takes place, an innocuous bottle of root beer can serve as an aphrodisiac, a plain white platter might turn out to be a piece of china from the Third Reich and a once-reliable daddy might suddenly decide to quit his job and devote his days to working out and getting high.

That 42-year-old drop-out is Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), one of those guys who probably gets misty-eyed when he sees those VW Bug commercials with the tagline, "if you sold your soul in the '80s...". "Both my wife and my daughter think I'm a gigantic loser," Lester notes in his narration of the story, "and they're right." Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) is an overzealous real estate agent who's so absorbed in visions of commissions and "sold" signs she barely even notices her husband, and teenage Janie (Thora Birch) has drifted away from the family and settled in on her own perpetually overcast island of adolescent angst. Conversations between the three are few, and the ones that do develop are generally spiked with sarcasm. When Lester asks Janie about her day in school, she dryly replies, "it was spectacular."

"I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell," Lester says, and it turns out most of his reveries involve Janie's friend Angela (Mena Suvari), an aspiring model with a baby doll face and a call girl's bravado. "I'm used to guys drooling over me," she sighes, in a tone that suggests both weariness and delight.

Lester first sees Angela performing in a halftime show at a high school basketball game. The number is atrocious (a smart bit of spoofery on the part of choreographer Paula Abdul), but Lester is transfixed by the girl nonetheless, and it's not long before he's jogging and pumping iron regularly in an attempt to trim down his slightly flabby physique. At the same time, the other members of the Burnham household have found outside interests as well: Carolyn is spending long lunch hours trying to wheedle sales secrets out of local real estate king Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher), while Janie has taken an interest in the boy next door, a slightly menacing-looking kid named Ricky (Wes Bentley) who keeps clean urine samples in his freezer just in case his dad (Chris Cooper) wants to check him for drug use.

Ball's script will ultimately string all of these people together, although not always in ways you might expect. In its probe of what lies beneath the shiny surface of everday life, "Beauty" sometimes recalls writer-director David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" or his ground-breaking TV series "Twin Peaks." Although Mendes is not quite as audacious a director as Lynch was in his heyday, the film is often visually arresting, with dazzling use of colors (particularly red) and motifs: Lester fantasizes about Angela bathing in rose petals, while the increasingly shrewish Carolyn trots around in a blouse adorned with a gaudy rose pattern.

In the underrated 1994 sleeper "The Ref," Spacey showed he has no equal when it comes to spitting out acidic recriminations and Ball gives him a choice selection of them here. Whether he's describing the high point of his day -- hint: it takes place in the shower -- or warning Janie "you'd better watch it, or you're going to turn into a real bitch, just like your mother," Spacey consistently nails that simmering rage that's been bubbling inside Lester for who knows how long. It's a magnificent comic performance.

Although she's undeniably amusing, Bening's hypertense Carolyn is slightly more problematic, sometimes careening close to caricature. She's ultimately grounded by two offbeat and oddly poignant crying scenes that show the woman's facade slipping and Carolyn literally trying to slap it back into place. Birch, Bentley and especially the wide-eyed Suvari all excel as they pull the strings of the adults around them. Even the supporting actors stand out here, particularly Allison Janney as a Stepford Wife whose batteries are running low and Cooper as a martinet with a mercurial temper and some unexpected needs. James Sanford

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