In Which the World is too Beautiful to Bear
Why did American Beauty win Best Picture? It’s a question that has vexed many a movie fan when reflecting upon the 2000 Academy Awards. After a year suffused with so many unique, groundbreaking, and just flat out terrific movies, how come the film community focused in on a quirky suburban drama as the superlative picture from a superlative year. This question bears down hard on the eve of American Beauty’s 20th birthday. The film has curdled like milk left out in the desert. Kevin Spacey’s Lester Burnham actively pursues a crime that he himself has been credibly accused of, the angst of middle class living has be brushed away by the angst of forever wars, climate change, and political upheaval, and the whole story is dolloped with an intensely outmoded view of homosexuality.
So the bemusement is understandable, but during this re-watch of Sam Mendes’ directorial debut I actually got it. I haven’t come around to the film on a qualitative level, but its success makes sense. Because in the moment, American Beauty represented the moment. A tetchy rebuke to the norms of society that was nervy enough to seem cool while being slick enough to go down smooth. It incorporates all the themes of the era (especially those seen in the previous three entries in this series) into a genre that’s easy for someone to grab on to.
American Beauty is a pretty standard domestic drama refracted through the existential longing of the late 20th century. In a way it’s not so different from something like The Matrix or Fight Club, taking the shapes of expected genre fare, and warping the contemporary world through them. Heck the film has a similar workplace plot to both Office Space and Fight Club (Lester gets fired with severance like The Narrator), and the blithe anti furniture spiel of Fincher’s film (Lester bemoans a couch while The Narrator talks about the terror of the IKEA lifestyle). Hell, there’s even a perverse through another person’s eyes sexual romance that isn’t too far from the one portrayed in Being John Malkovich.
So why hasn’t American Beauty aged like those other films (criminal behavior of the star notwithstanding)? It might be because it hues so close to trying to emulate the feelings of reality than the others. Don’t get me wrong the movie is an extremely heightened piece of work (the magical realist flourishes and purely archetypal characters assure that), but it’s a movie that desperately wants to dig down and find the profound in the mundane moments of modern living. This forces the American Beauty to be so of the moment that it can’t really escape it. Heck the premise of the film shudders under the weight of knowing things like 9/11 and the Financial Crisis are right around the corner.
The problems do go deeper as well, despite the assured direction from Mendes, some great cracks in Alan Ball’s script, and unique and entrancing score from Thomas Newman, the thing can’t hold up to scrutiny. At the time it was easier to wave away the problems with the story because of the big ideas it was tackling (in Ebert’s four-star review he has to admit that the final act is a farce played straight), but with the big ideas withered by the march of years (and of course the whole Spacey factor) it just becomes harder and harder to take the whole seriously.
It’s gross and grotesque that Lester’s lusting after Angela (Mena Suvari) is the impetus for his suburban rebellion. The film thrills at the idea that Lester’s life can be improved by chasing after this Lolita romance, but never fully commits to the bit. How come he gives up the ghost when he learns that she’s a virgin? It feels like the story chickening out before the curtains fall. Giggling with edgy glee by, “going there,” only too pull back in the face of reckoning with what Lester’s actions truly mean.
Lester’s wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is also treated with an odd amount of antipathy. She too is going through a bought of existential despair, but her actions are treated as contemptible rather than laudable, like the lusts of Lester. Yes she cheats on him, and the film sneers at this sexual action as it pumps Lester up. Carolyn is the metonym for all the strictures and fears of modern living. She’s conformist, controlling, and denying of all of Lester’s impulses. Lester wants her to get back to when she, “faked seizures to leave parties,” which means that he just wants her to confirm to him.
And of course there’s Ricky Fitz (Wes Bentley) and his beautiful bag in the wind. The second most groan worthy scene in retrospect is also the philosophical hinge of the movie. Fitz shows Lester’s daughter Jane (Thora Birch) his video and expounds upon the meaning of life. On paper this scene actually makes perfectly logical sense. It’s Ball and Mendes demonstrating how purpose and meaning can be found anywhere in the world, even when it seems confining and pointless. But it’s execution is now laughable in a way that’s difficult to articulate. Maybe it’s Ftiz’s bald sincerity talking about the fluttering plastic, or the swelling melancholic music underneath, but whatever profundity is found in the bag is lost on the screen.
This issue of the profound evaporating in cinematic execution is the whole final act of American Beauty. Mendes and Ball preposterously construct a series of Rube Goldberg like contraptions to get to the ending of the film. There’s of course Lester deciding not to have sex with Angela, there’s Carolyn taking her time in the car before she gets home, there’s Ricky and Jane hanging out to avoid all other people, and then there is of course the scene where Ricky’s father Frank (Chris Cooper) mistakes a weed transaction with a blow job. And it’s just bad, a contrivance beyond belief that’s played as straight drama. I am honestly at a loss trying to convey how tortured the framing of the scene is, and how awkward it is as justification for the film’s climax. It feels like Ball and Mendes just needed to goose the story towards the promised death at the end, and this is the best they could come up with.
And yet, I still kind of get the appeal. For all of the faults with the film its still somewhat bracing on a surface level. All the actors bring considerable energy to their roles, Mendes’ direction is formally assured without becoming overly showy, and Ball’s words hit at the deep seated fears and rebelliousness of the times. And as the one century transitioned to the next, it felt like for a brief moment that the ennui embedded in American Beauty would remain the greatest of our concerns. No horrific catastrophe struck when the dates ended in 00, and the future still existed ahead of the world. So why not bask in this moment where suburban worries were the biggest ones, and why not reward something that takes it down a peg in an elegant way. I can’t begrudge the past for knowing that this world wouldn’t last.
Odds and Ends
- In the sweep of Oscar history in the 90’s American Beauty was actually a much more daring and cool Best Picture choice than hindsight would admit. Between the 1990 and and 2003 ceremonies American Beauty was joined by Silence of the Lambs as the only Best Picture winners not to be historical dramas. We whinge about the Oscars now, but they were exponentially more stolid in the past.
- We would really be having a riot if The Cider House Rules had won Best Picture.
- I think Ball would go on to better articulate his ideas here in Six Feet Under, a show, for all its faults, stuck the landing.
- The Spacey of it all. It’s impossible to watch this and not think of his crimes. And it honestly does undermine the whole movie for me. I just can’t get it out of my head that this is an person who wouldn’t just act out pursuing minors for sex, but did so in real life. I begrudge no one for not wanting to engage at all.
As always, twitter, letterboxd, and I Chews You (the podcast about cooking and eating Pokemon).
Next Week: Can you believe it has been 20 years since Election.