American Beauty
With Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, and Allison Janney.
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However, unlike Mumford–another ambitious comedy-drama opening this week that’s pitched as a sort of State of the Union address–American Beauty can’t be accused of wrapping an audience in the comforting cocoon of nostalgia. Yearning for an older version of America and American movies constitutes both the appeal and the limitation of Mumford, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s parable about a mysterious young man (Loren Dean) with the same name as the small town he moves into, posing as a trained psychologist. It’s a movie so pleased with its brand of folk wisdom that it can easily con you into overlooking the sketchiness of its characters. The characters in American Beauty are similarly designed to illustrate lessons, but it’s part of the strength of Alan Ball’s screenplay that most of the lessons seem to be worth learning.
This isn’t to claim that everything in American Beauty is new, but it does have a welcome freshness. Its writer-coproducer and its director are both newcomers to movies. Ball has a background in theater and TV and is perhaps best known as a writer for the TV series Cybill; Sam Mendes is the much-celebrated stage director of The Blue Room (a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s most famous play, starring Nicole Kidman) and the recent revival of Cabaret. I haven’t seen either of those productions, but I’m told that part of what’s impressive about them is their inventive handling of space. The same could be said for American Beauty. Like Mike Nichols in The Graduate, Mendes seems elated to be adapting and expanding his stage-bound mise en scene (aided by the exquisite lighting of cinematographer Conrad Hall), an elation that can be seen in his camera moves and his choices of pop tunes. (He’s even more daring than Nichols when he makes an unmotivated lighting change–the sort of thing that’s common onstage–to underscore the movie’s first indication that its teenage heroine has a crush on its teenage hero.) And like Paul Brickman in Risky Business, he knows how to use the euphorically percussive and propulsive repetitions of New Age music–what sounds like wind chimes accompanied by a pile driver–to chart the stages of his hero’s success.
All these characters have a grotesque side, with the colonel receiving top honors. But Lester’s wife, Carolyn–an aggressive real estate agent with a phony manner and an obsession with objects and cleanliness–is every bit as extreme a caricature. After she starts an affair with another real estate agent (Peter Gallagher), who gets her interested in firing guns to express her rage, her monstrous parallels with the colonel, who has a gun collection of his own, become fully apparent. (Lester and Ricky have parallels as good guys, one reason the script brings them together as friends and has them virtually duplicate each other’s mystical speech about beauty in the world.) Both characters are so didactically conceived that even vigorous performances by Bening and Cooper fail to make them fully human. Moreover, they exist almost exclusively as foils to the other characters, defined mainly by their function as villains. It might be more accurate to say that they, along with Angela, start off as villains and wind up evoking pity, yet they remain one-note characters, lacking the flexibility and depth of Lester, Jane, and Ricky.
