# American Beauty (1999)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

    AMERICAN BEAUTY
    (DreamWorks)
    Starring:  Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari, Wes
    Bentley, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher.
    Screenplay:  Alan Ball.
    Producers:  Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks.
    Director:  Sam Mendes.
    MPAA Rating:  R (profanity, adult themes, sexual situations, drug use,
    nudity, violence)
    Running Time:  120 minutes.
    Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

"Look closer..." invites the tag line for AMERICAN BEAUTY, and rarely has a two-word advertising campaign so effectively captured virtually everything a film has to say. AMERICAN BEAUTY is being touted as _the_ American film of 1999, a caustic no-holds-barred peek behind the curtains of demented suburbia. It's easy to understand much of the praise, since it captures you in its world virtually from the first frame. It's also a surprisingly simple film in which the notions that should be its subtext dominate its text. Simultaneously gripping and frustrating, AMERICAN BEAUTY is the best film of the year that irritated the hell out of me.

AMERICAN BEAUTY opens on an Everytown, USA suburban street, where 42-year-old Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is about to undergo a radical life change. Intimidated by his ferociously ambitious real estate agent wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), alienated from his teenage daughter Janey (Thora Birch) and disgusted with his job as at an advertising industry publication, Lester feels numb to the world. That is until he sees Janey's fellow cheerleader Angela (Mena Suvari), a vision who comes to dominate his every thought. Lester suddenly decides to change everything in his quest for what's missing, a journey paralleled by Janey's relationship with enigmatic neighbor Ricky (Wes Bentley) and Carolyn's affair with a big-shot competitor (Peter Gallagher).

This, first and most important: Kevin Spacey is brilliant. That's not exactly news, since Spacey has been brilliant on a regular basis for several years, but in AMERICAN BEAUTY he burns himself into an incredibly difficult role. There is a hyper-real feeling to much of the film -- a sense of people perceiving the world and people around them at an exaggerated, almost grotesque level -- yet Spacey finds the ideal balance between Lester the comic sadsack and Lester the rejuvenated man. He grips Alan Ball's best lines of dialogue and spits them out like bullets, dominating the film so completely you may not realize how little screen time he actually has. Bentley and Birch are also quite effective in their scenes together, providing the extremely relative base of normalcy around which the more heightened performances by Bening, Suvari and Chris Cooper (as Ricky's Marine father) whirl.

The twisted, surreal vision of America provided by Ball and director Sam Mendes -- even with its now-preditable assault on soul-deadening middle class life -- could have made for a masterpiece with a revelatory sensitbility at its core. Instead, it's a very good film that makes a very rare mistake. Where most films exist entirely at the surface level, AMERICAN BEAUTY exists entirely _below_ the surface, which is both tragic and ironic. It's easy to say that AMERICAN BEAUTY is about finding joy in the improbable places already around you instead of seeking unattainable ideals of joy, because the film makes this message excruciatingly clear in Ricky's comments about his obsession with videotaping, as well as Lester's narrative voice-overs. The ostensibly surprising moments in AMERICAN BEAUTY begin losing their power to surprise, since the film keeps telling you that things are not what they seem on the surface. It never allows a moment to let the surfaces just be surfaces, opting instead to spell out that real beauty is a wind-blown plastic bag.

Amazingly, AMERICAN BEAUTY still manages to be occasionally spell-binding, even as it stumbles through its literalism. Mendes shows an impressive command of film language for a rookie with stage roots, using the talents of cinematographer Conrad Hall and composer Thomas Newman to create strong, always consistent vision. AMERICAN BEAUTY dazzles, it entertains, it shows off an actor at the top of his form. It just isn't nearly as enlightening as it seems to be, because it never asks the viewer to do too much work. As good as the film is, it isn't necessary for us to look closer. The film-makers have done all the looking for us.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 beauty marks:  7.

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