# American Beauty (1999)

### reviewed by
Louis Proyect

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) enjoys all the outward trappings of middle-class success in the aptly but ironically titled film "American Beauty": a beautiful wife named Carolyn (Annette Bening) with her own real-estate business and a teenage daughter with no obvious flaws. But his life is joyless. His sole pleasure seems to be masturbating in the shower each morning, an act that he keeps secret from his wife with whom he no longer has sexual relations.

Their life is filled with empty rituals. They sit in a well-appointed dining room each evening trading insults over their meal, while the strains of schmaltzy arrangements of Rogers and Hammerstein show tunes are heard on the stereo in utter contrast to the acrimony at the table. Sexual tension would explain most of the bickering between husband and wife. Their daughter Jane (Thora Burch) has no use for either of them as well, but holds her father in greater contempt for his remoteness. When he makes clumsy attempts to bond with her, she recoils in disgust.

A series of events will soon destroy any illusions that they had in normal family life. Lester has a meeting with a personnel manager whose task it is to figure out what people are contributing to the media corporation that employs them. Everybody, including Lester, is supposed to turn in a one page summary of what their job responsibilities consist of--presumably those whose summaries seem superfluous to the operation of the corporation will become superfluous themselves. A spark of rebellion prompts Lester to tell the manager that this is just a thinly disguised downsizing plot. This initial meeting leads to mounting confrontations with the corporate world that sustains him and his empty lifestyle.

Later that week the Burnhams go to see their daughter perform in an absurdly choreographed cheerleader dance number during half-time at a high-school basketball game. He fixates on Angela (Mena Suvari), the sexually precocious best friend of his daughter, who picks up on his interest later that evening in the parking lot of the high school. >From that point on she finds excuses to drop by the Burnham household where she knows that Lester will leer at her. Their sexual flirtations disgust his daughter.

His wife is oblivious to all this. Her only interest in life is selling real estate. In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, she is depicted feverishly cleaning a house early in the morning to make it attractive to prospective buyers. Her entire day is then spent with customers telling her that the house is unattractive. At the end of the day, with the house unsold, she collapses in tears. Selling houses is the only pleasure she gets out of life, an act analogous to her husband's masturbation.

Into their tortured lives enters a young man, who offers Lester liberation from boredom and oppression. Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) is a compulsive video photographer whom daughter Carolyn regards as a voyeur after catching him in the act of filming her late one night. Her father sees another side of Ricky. His other avocation besides video is smoking and selling high-powered marijuana out of the bedroom of his house. Lester soon becomes one of his best customers. Smoking marijuana combines with the realization that the corporate world does not matter to him anymore. What really matters is wooing his daughter's libidinous classmate and living the lifestyle he enjoyed as a 21 year old. He begins listening to Jimi Hendrix in his garage as he pumps iron after Angela has told him that he needs to work out a little. When he is not lifting weights, he is smoking expensive pot.

"American Beauty" is best at describing the futility of American middle-class life. It is understandably weak in presenting a believable alternative, since there is none within the confines of the capitalist system. Poor Earl and Carolyn are driven to find salvation within the system--her on the system's own terms and he within an "alternative" lifestyle that owes more to a Levi's commercial than anything else. Screenwriter Alan Ball's rebels are a middle-aged man who lapses into late adolescence and an adolescent drug dealer who operates within the fringes of consumerist society. What is marijuana, after all, than the ultimate commodity. When he is showing Lester his wares, he makes a sales pitch for genetically modified weed that uses top secret government biotechnology and sells for $2000 an ounce.

"American Beauty", whatever its flaws, is worth seeing as a snapshot of American society at a peculiar juncture in its unfolding as an empire. In the final years of the second term of the Clinton administration, which by some standards has produced more material success than has been enjoyed in many years, Hollywood is turning out films that curse the system that produced it.

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