American Beauty
# 1 Best of Film of 1999
In 1979, I picked Robert Redford's brilliant family drama Ordinary People as my top film of the year. Today, I give this honor to Sam Mende's family drama American Beauty.
The Burnham family looks like the good ole' American family. Just by looking at them, this is what we see: successful father, successful mother and homemaker (she gets dinner out on the table every night), and successful daughter (high school cheerleader). But don't be fooled by appearances because behind their beautiful oak door and elegantly draped windows lay strong animosities and a forum for neglect and mental abuse not seen since Mary Tyler Moore's ice-treatment in People.This is 90's cynicism at its best.
When we get to know them, however, this is what we find: Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a loser who has given up on his wife, family, and job. He quits his job, blackmails his boss, dreams immoral thoughts about his daughter's girlfriend, Angela (Mena Suvari), and exercises in order to be able to seduce this girlfriend.
His wife, Carolyn (Annette Benning), is a perfectionist who wants badly to succeed at being a real-estate agent. She'll do anything to succeed, including physically abusing herself while chanting self-motivational phrases, sleeping with the top real-estate agent, and plotting to kill her husband.
Their daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), is an un-noticeable who is suffering from low self-worth and lack of attention from her parents. In fact, her parents haven't talked heart-to-heart with her for years. She obsesses about her looks because she doesn't hold a candle to her friend, Angela, who is not only beautiful but also desired by all the boys, including Jane's father. Jane is so embarrassed by and angry at her parents, especially her father, that she plots to have him murdered.
The neighbor boy Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), one of the most unique characters in film, is the son of a retired general who is both an over-protective and abusive father (Chris Cooper). How over-protective? He submits his son to daily urine tests. Ricky has learned to tell his dad only what his dad wants to hear, nothing more, nothing less.
American Beauty is witty, cynical, thoroughly engrossing, and oddly beautiful. It opens the mind and makes one look inward. It shows us who we are and who we should be; how we close ourselves off from one another, remove ourselves from responsibilities, and lose the ability to love, forgive, and change until it is too late. In truth, one of our greatest problems is that we are not very nice to those outside of our circle of friends, or outside our culture, religion, status, sexual-orientation, and most importantly, within our own families.
In a hauntingly beautiful scene, Ricky Fitts shows Jane video footage of a plastic bag flying about in the funnels of the wind in an alley. For many, they are like this bag, struggling to find refuge from the forceful currents surrounding them. The beauty is that these people adapt and flow with the currents and await the moment when they can touch solid ground and finally find meaning in life and themselves.
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