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American Beauty (The Awards Edition) Customer Reviews (88 - 90 of 109 Reviews)

What A Movie!!
I was blown away the first time I saw this film and have not been able to turn away from it since. The characters portrayed by the extremely talented cast in this movie were so real life that I was captivated by this movie until the end. A must see for any movie fan!

Middle-aged crazy
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is your usual well-behaved 42-year-old dreg of an American dad until he spots his teenaged daughter's girl friend, Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari) whose beauty transforms him. Part of the fun of this very funny and enjoyable movie is watching Lester break out of his self-imposed shell and blossom with the rose petals as he tells everybody what he really thinks as though he had nothing to lose.

His daughter Jane is a brooding raven-haired beauty who likes to put on a white-powdered face and red Betty Boop lips to go with her full figure. Thora Birch, who plays Jane, has a face that can mesmerize, and Director Sam Mendes puts her to work mesmerizing us.

Annette Bening, in a comedic tour de force, plays Lester's wife Carolyn, a straitlaced, uptight, worry wart who sells real estate. Next door we have, just moving in, 18-year-old Ricky Fitts, played with sly self-assurance by Wes Bentley, the dope-dealing, Bible-suit wearing, photog son of Marine Corps Colonel Frank Fitts and his mostly catatonic wife. Two houses down there's Jim and Jim, your smiling yuppie fruit loops and all-around neighborhood sweet guys. They are however an embarrassment to Colonel Fitts who is living in the deep, dark corner of a very large denial closet, paranoid to the teeth that his only son has inherited the same shameful desires and will act them out. In an effort to keep Ricky disciplined and on the straight and narrow, the good Colonel practices various forms of child abuse ranging from bare-knuckle beatings to medicated imprisonment.

In other words what we have here is your typical American suburban street. What makes American Beauty a great success is a witty script with a deep and beautiful lesson for our age by Alan Ball, superb direction by Sam Mendes and outstanding performances from just about everybody in the cast. Bening is brilliant with her silly finger gestures and her one foot sideways stance, like a fawn just learning to walk, and her squinty little eyes full of merriment, and that raised and then downward pointing index finger of indignant reproof. (But she really needs to keep her pretty shins off the bedposts or at least off the wall.) Mena Suvari is perhaps no more beautiful than any number of other screen darlings, but she has a litany of sexy expressions and poses that inspire delight. Her portrayal of a fast lane teen siren whose talk is bigger than her experience is just perfect. She might be a budding star.

But more than anything this is an uplifting and satisfying tale of an unappreciated, unloved and mostly ignored man who is inspired to transform his life by the beauty of a girl. For many people (and for most women, I would wager) falling in love at first sight with a teenaged girl just because she is beautiful is shallow and beside the point, inappropriate and not fair. But women love men for their power and their strength and their standing in society. Is that fair to those men who have none? Lester's love for Angela was so great that it transcended carnality, but he didn't know that until he began to take off her clothes and then he realized something very beautiful. He could love her without making love to her. If he took advantage of her youth and inexperience, it would cheapen his love for her and possibly destroy it. Maybe some people in the audience felt he wasn't a real man because he stopped, but I tend to feel the opposite. Not that I think there is anything wrong with making love to 18-year-old girls (on the contrary); but if the girl is incapable of experiencing that love, then perhaps it is better to love her from afar without a sexual expression, even at the risk of disappointing her, especially if you're old enough to be her father, and especially if you really do love her. Notice that in the next scene she is bored and for her the magic of sexuality is gone. He might as well be her father.

So much of what we are presented through the media is a focus on those males who would only be able to express themselves in some sexually-exploitive manner. So much of what we read insists that this is the only way men are. I'm happy to say that American Beauty presents another point of view, and presents it beautifully.

The point made by the surprising ending (and the reason for the presence of the Marine colonel and the two gay guys) is that our contemporary "enlightened" society may recognize the legitimacy of homosexual love, but continues to hypocritically condemn the love of a man for a young girl.


Give Me a Break
Boy, am I getting tired of this kind of movie.

Every few years a film comes along designed to skewer the supposed "complacency" of middle America. You know, we're all a bunch of shallow, crass, materialistic, out-of-touch, hypocritical phonies who've failed to connect with the "beauty" of everyday life.

A few years ago, it was "The Ice Storm." Bored American suburbanite couples contemplating adultery. An alienated teen-age daughter who romances the misfit/social outcast boy next door. Recreational drug use to underscore the general sense of ennui. Then, at the end, somebody dies, and that tragedy is supposed to imbue the movie with resonance and meaning.

Or did I just describe "American Beauty"? Oh, well, doesn't matter. In another few years, another filmmaker will crank out another cinematic screed along the same lines, and no doubt that film will wow critics and win multiple awards as well.

The real tragedy of "American Beauty" is that the script had real potential. If you ever had the opportunity to read Alan Ball's screenplay (available on the Internet), you're in for what they call in Hollywood "a good read." Ball is an exceptionally gifted writer and has a real ear for dialogue. My problem is with the film's direction. Others have raved about Sam Mendes. Kindly include me out on that score: his direction reeks to high heaven. Rather than working to flesh out his characters, he portrays his characters as unsympathetic cartoons. Spacey, Bening (lord, especially Bening) and several other, ahem, "actors" give screeching, eye-bulging, over-the-top, look-ma-I'm-in-a-movie type performances. Mena Suvari's turn as the would-be high school nympho wouldn't get past the first round of a casting call for the TV version of "Clueless." Only Thora Birch (a long underrated actress) and newcomer Wes Bentley manage to give sympathetic, humanistic performances. The rest of the cast seems to think it's in an episode of "Hogan's Heroes."

And therein lies the problem. This is one of those movies that isn't funny enough to rate as a good comedy yet doesn't take itself seriously enough to work as drama. Spacey gets a few funny lines (okay, he gets all the funny lines) but that's essentially it.

By contrast, Robert Redford's "Ordinary People" back in 1980 (written by Alvin Sargent) also tackled the subjects of loveless marriage, alienated youth, angst in suburbia, and so forth, but it did so with a great sense of compassion for its lead characters. Deep down, "American Beauty" has contempt for its characters, and for that reason the film never really connects. It would be like having the makers of "Amos & Andy" direct "Roots". The filmmakers were so blinded by their desire to give suburbia the cinematic finger that they missed the opportunity to explore real human emotions.

Maybe they should have looked closer.

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