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American Beauty**
For me this otherwise dry and
lean viewing season was more than compensated for by three
releases: Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Martin
Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, and David Fincher's Fight
Club. (Reviews of the latter two films appear below; the
Kubrick will be the subject of a separate piece.) Two films
that came out during the period--American Beauty and Three
Kings--were labeled as "masterpieces" by
several reviewers. I still have not seen Three Kings
but I did see American Beauty and it is certainly no
masterpiece. It is a reasonably entertaining, modestly
amusing picture but this kind of hyperbole does no credit to
the movie or the reviewer. Personally, I would like to
propose a moratorium on the use of the word
"masterpiece" unless it is to refer to films made
at least forty years ago. Very few films are recognizably
"masterpieces" upon their first release, and the
ones that are--for example, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
Greed, Potemkin, or even Citizen Kane--are
the exceptions rather than the rule. In no other art would
people be so naive as to believe it is possible to spot a
masterpiece at first glance. (Ironically, the Kubrick, which
was largely snubbed by both reviewers and the public, is a
masterpiece if there ever was one.) However, American
Beauty, the first film to be directed by Sam Mendes, is
the sort of comfortably "good" movie that doesn't
disturb anyone and never fails to attract glowing reviews and
a swarm of admirers. Everything in American Beauty
that makes it a "good" movie prevents it from being
a better or more imaginative one than it is. I realize it may
not be fair to attack a director's first effort in this way,
but I would not care to see Mendes continue in the same vein
just as I find it galling to see reviewers who sneered at far
more original works slobbering over a cinematic mediocrity
like this. American
Beauty takes no risks, and as far as I am
concerned it isn't even worthy to lick Fight Club's dirty boots.
The most apt word to describe
the film, I think, is polished. But it owes its polish, more
than anything else, to the labors of previous generations of
dramatists. The scenario, about the spectacular midlife
crisis of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and the repercussions
this crisis has upon his family, has its roots in the
realistic stage drama that has been in vogue in this country
since the 1920's, but more especially in the plays of
Tennessee Williams and William Inge in the 1950's. Yet where
Williams and Inge had pretensions to Chekhov, if not
Shakespeare, American Beauty has more in
common with "absurdist" farces of the 1960's like
Jules Feiffer's Little Murders--at least for its first
half or so. And what poor soul who has ever been stuck in a
supermarket checkout line and has been forced to stare at
tabloid headlines about the JonBenet murder case, what poor
soul who has had to endure a punishment like that might not
welcome a maliciously comic take on that all-American
institution, the dysfunctional family. But alas, the
film fails to make good on its initial promise and becomes
increasingly sour and self-righteous as it unfolds, finally
falling back upon a miserable cliché left over from the
Vietnam War years for its dénouement. When the Burnham's next door neighbor,
Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), a career officer in the USMC
who is patently psychotic also turns out to be a closet gay
and does in Lester, it is enough to make the viewer feel
sorry for the Marine Corps.
Put in philosophical terms,
the theme of the movie might be characterized as appearance
and reality among the American bourgeoisie. However, what the
social reality here might be--in contrast to the absolute
reality of F.H. Bradley, whose magnum opus bears this
Hegelian commonplace as its title--remains both elusive and
allusive, and American Beauty, faute de mieux,
has nothing left to do but save appearances. It does so in
part through the expert cinematography of the veteran Conrad
Hall, but most of all through a number of first-rate
performances, including Annette Bening as Lester's unhappy
spouse Carolyn and Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts, the son of the
deranged neighbor. However, it is Kevin Spacey who really
walks away with the movie in the role of Lester; if he
receives an Oscar ® for his turn here, as he well may, he
will certainly have earned his reward. It is worth the
price of admission to witness the scene in which Carolyn
returns and finds her husband in the garage, doing bench
presses while smoking a joint. If only the entire movie had been as funny and
inventive as this episode!
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net
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