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American Beauty (The Awards Edition) Customer Reviews (7 - 9 of 109 Reviews)

A Beautiful American Film
American Beauty" is another modern day film that it seems to me has fallen foul of the narrow-minded vision of the marketing men and those responsible for the film's trailers. They must really hate it when an almost genre-less film like this comes along and they simply do not know how to classify it or what to write up as the advertising blurb.
I was expecting a tale of a teenage femme fetale and her effects on an depressed aging middle-aged male, but also was expecting a sniggering "black comedy" as the back of the box had told me.
I got neither, but what I did get was the most engaging and intelligent film I have seen for a long while. I do have some sympathies with the advertising men as the film is pretty had to classify. It's not a black comedy and yet there are some genuinely amusing scenes. It's not a tale of a middle class American family and yet it almost solely features the Burnham family and those close to them. I guess the best I can do to describe it is call it a modern day saga of the breakdown of relationships.

Every single one of the characters shown has some sort of problem with the way their lives are developing, (apart from the smiley happy gay couple next door.) Lester Burnham is the classic 40 something miserable burned out executive. His wife doesn't love or care for him anymore, she is only concerned that he doesn't embarrass her. His daughter doesn't talk to him anymore and has confessed to her boyfriend she would like him dead. Lester for his own part undermines and belittles his wife at every opportunity, he unashamedly lusts after his daughter's school friend and ridicules and alienates his bosses until they are forced to fire him. Their neighbours, the Fitts, include ex-marine Col Frank Fitts, a stoic military type who forces his son into giving urine samples to test for drug abuse. The son, Ricky, a camera fanatic has taken to filming the local goings on including some dubious footage of the Burnham family. There are plenty more besides this motley selection and it is the quirks and oddities of the characters that makes the film what it is, but at the same time the oddities are ones that we can relate to and maybe even rather scarily see in ourselves. Again for nearly all the characters we can find traits we despise and yet because of failings in other areas we feel sympathy for them at the same time.

The performances are to a man extremely accomplished and well executed. Kevin Spacey won a deserved Oscar for his portrayal of Lester Burnham and Annette Bening was also nominated. Their performances and those of the other actors are all played with delicacy, humanity and a great deal of believability.

Well recommended and a must see for any fans of the cinema.

Don't believe the hype-othetical!
American Beauty though visually appealing, well acted, and quite entertaining in many places, is still a very troubling film experiance to suffer through. It is a film that tries to pass itself off as a realistic piece, but is in actually hypothetical to a fault. It is as if the writer, Alan Ball, decided to pull a bunch of "What ifs" from his hat. What if there was a high level administative type guy entering his midlife cricis, so he dicides to say "Bite Me!" to the man, quits his high pressure job in favor of a fun fast food environment, starts smoking a lot of pot, buys the muscle car of his dreams, then begins getting buffed out in an attempt to have sex with his daughters hot young cheerleader friend? What if this mans wife thinks that her husband is an inadequate closet case that deserves little more then contempt, so she undermines the realationship and has an affair with the number one realter in her city? ( played by Peter Gallagher who has made a carrer out of playing the adulterous other man) What if the new next door neighbor to this same man happens to be a starched militant drill sergeant who is in actuality a repressed homophobic homosexual with an unwholesome tendancy to fly off the handle in violent outbursts of uncontrollable rage? It can be argued that these " What ifs" I speak of are merely the results of good fiction writing, but that excuse does not explain the rather questionable behavior of the characters in this farce. To better explain my point let me now ask you, the reader, a little hypothetical question of my own.
Lets say for the sake of arguement, that you were over a close friends house chatting in the upstairs bedroom, as their father sat downstairs by himself in a darkened kitchen. All of a sudden you hear the unmistakable explosive sound of a large caliber hand gun echoing through the house from the very location of the said father. So now your friend and you in sure panic hustle down the stair case with your hearts pounding in your throats anticipating God knows what, only to find your worst fears realized. Your friends father is hunched over a blood and gore coated table, deader then a doornail with a sizable seeping hole in his head, and an eerie smirk frozen on his dead face. What would you do?

A) Would you flip out and go hysterical and possibly run down the walk way screaming blue murder like the poor maid who discovered the butchered bodies at the Sharon Tates house?

B) Or would you study the dead body like an exhibit at the Smithsonian, and smile back at the smirking corpse while your friend does nothing but act all nonchalant about their freshly murdered father?

Unfortunately the fine people who brought you American Beauty did not answer A, they figured that B, was a suitable ending for this fine story. Believe you me, the sigh of dissapointment I let out in the theatre was heard 10 rows back. To make matters even more dire, they also chose to have the murderer be the militant homophobe next door, talk about problematic representation of sexuality, according to these guys, homosexuality might as well be a mental illness that brings with it the confused desire to kill any straight person who snubs their passes, YIKES!! My second sigh of grief was fallowed by a rather lenthy profane grumble of disgust. As a result I have only seen this film two times, once in 1999 at the theatre, the second time about four months back in an attempt to give this film a second chance. The result is obvious, the same sence of betrayal I felt still prevaded any enjoyment that the situations may have provided me in this film, overall the film was killed by its hypothetical cliche's.
P.S. as a side note, I think that Meg Griffen from the Family Guy played the role of Kevin Spacy's daughter in this film, but don't hold me to it.

Brilliant Movie!
It definitely deserved its award for Best Picture. I've never seen a film that portrayed the "all-American dream" suburbean family with such intelligence, hope, honesty, tragedy, and dark humor. This movie doesn't at all sugarcoat any of the characters; instead, the characters sugarcoat themselves. And most brilliant of all, they don't lead us to predictable territory. Just when you think of the typical thing that usually happens, or could have happened, to these characters, things turn around, surprising us with a whole different outcome and consequence. Kevin Spacey's calm narration itself was a chilling contrast to not only the seemingly beautiful and peaceful neighborhood that his character Lester lived, but also to the melancholy and tragic outcome of his life and that of his family and his neighbors. Also, an awesome performance by Allison Janney. Mena Suvari, who played Angela, the sly and sexually obsessed cheerleading teenager that Lester falls for (thus beginning his fantasies for her, such as the memorable roses in the bathtub scene), also did a great job. However, I felt that she made it too obvious that she, too, wanted to seduce Lester. I believe it would have been more affective if she was portrayed as an innocent girl in person, but then naughty in Lester's fantasy world. The fact that she would have had kicks out of seducing Lester to begin with didn't make the fantasy scenes very, well, make-believe. Personally, I felt like the way she spoke to Lester sensually was just kind of cheesy and obvious, purposely catering to Lester's fantasy. I'm sure that was the point, but oh well, that's just the only tiny thing that irked me in the movie. The rest is brilliant, shocking, and just tragic, while still, somehow, bringing upon a message of hope.

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