Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Smile, You're at Mr. Smiley's! First Impressions of "American Beauty" (SPOILERS)

"I'm just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose" Kevin Spacey delivers this smugly defiant line as the unforgettable every-man protagonist in 1999's American Beauty, which earned Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Spacey) and Best Original Screenplay. Those of us who were watching television in 1999 may remember seeing parodies of a nude Mena Suvari covered in roses surfacing everywhere, particularly sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live.

It's been almost twenty years the film's release, but I finally made it through the entire film this year, thanks to Netflix. When I was younger, I was taken aback by the film's frank sexuality. How many Best Picture Oscar winners feature someone masturbating in the shower within the first two minutes? American Beauty is bold. It's stirring. It's dark, funny and of course it's very beautiful.

The film's beauty isn't found in a glamorously hot cast or lush scenery. In fact, director Sam Mendes assembled the perfectly drab looking cast and nondescript filming locations to construct what is essentially a post-modern farce. Everyone looks all-American and they all live in a picturesque town which is essentially Brentwood, Los Angeles standing in for a nameless Chicago suburb. The film is a complete send up of the archetypes which inhabit and characterize American suburban culture.
Though one learns more with subsequent views, American Beauty isn't a film of nuance. It is one of overtones and hyper-conscious symbolism. The film has inspired countless interpretations, and the filmmakers concur that there isn't a definitive way to view the film.

The heart of the film is Lester Burnham, whose spiritual journey is the film's centerpiece and driving story. But all of the main characters represent different facets of suburbia. Lester's wife Carolyn (played brilliantly by Annette Bening) is shrewd, materialistic and shallow, yet even she is pushed to the limits when her portrait of perfect life is shattered by her husband's nonconformity. Like her father, the Burnhams' daughter Jane (Thora Birch) gradually stands up to her parents' disguised dysfunction by running away with their outsider neighbor Ricky Fitts.

The Fitts' serve as secondary characters, yet their story reveals just as much about suburban life as the Burnhams. The family patriarch Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) dons the guise of a staunch, violent homophobic traditionalist, yet his malice is revealed to a repression of his own homosexuality. His wife has become nearly catatonic due to years of romantic distance and neglect. Their misfit son Ricky is conversely viewed as an alien in the eyes of conformist society, and as the free-spirited voice of reason when Lester and his daughter conclude their character arcs.

All of the characters are essentially actors within the film. As one character mentions in his best advertising voice, "In order to be successful, one must project an image of success". Many of the characters present images different from their true selves. Carolyn barely hides her contemptuous venom for her husband with a cold, wifely etiquette. Angela appears to be a lusty, sexually precocious young woman but she is in fact a virgin. This is an overall commentary of what lies beneath the postcard-ready image of the picturesque all-American culture.

Perhaps the most touching and insightful message of the film comes in the form of Lester rejecting middle age, one in which he spent the best years of his life developing. He sacrificed his youthful freedom to earn the American dream; a successful wife and a daughter who both appear to be normal on the surface. Yet he feels completely disillusioned and lost, as they both resent him and love is essentially implied to be dead in his household. When Lester finds inspiration in his daughters' friends Angela (Mena Suvari) and Ricky, he decides to reclaim his youth by working out, listening to rock music and quitting a corporate position to work at a fast food drive-thru.

That's how it appears on the surface, but really Lester is freeing himself from conformist imprisonment. Early in the film, there's an abundance of prison symbolism, from the reflection of bars in his work's computer screen to his demeaning wife, who is essentially a prison warden rushing him from one place to the next. When Lester begins to fantasize about Angela and envy Ricky's exuberance, he begins to free himself and reclaim his character. At the beginning of the film, Lester is a nameless inmate caught up in a system of conformity, and eventually gains enough confidence to push back against the system, symbolized by his by-the-book wife.

Lester's journey doesn't conclude with him abandoning adulthood and embracing a lost adolescence. While it was necessary for him to undergo his mid-life crisis to refocus his priorities, he comes full circle by learning to be a father again. At first he views Angela as an object of desire, but his fatherly instincts are reborn when he sees her as a naked, vulnerable child in need of comfort. When Lester is finally killed, he remarks that he's nonetheless happy, because there's so much beauty in the world.

Like Fight Club (released the same year), American Beauty is a message of hope wrapped in dark humor and sometimes disturbing content. It's a cautionary tale for one to treasure life before it slips away, and to not overlook beauty around us every day, even in the most unusual places. Through all of the sexual depravity and cynical humor, American Beauty is one of the few films I would say is truly thought provoking and has the potential to inspire real change in one's life.

Plus, the soundtrack kicks ass.




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