Best year ever: Looking closer at American Beauty

How do we talk about “American Beauty” today?

Sam Mendes’ tragicomedy was released to critical acclaim 25 years ago. It was a commercial success, bringing in $130 million in the United States to become the 13th-highest grosser of 1999. It also dominated the Oscars, bringing home trophies for best picture, best actor, best director, best screenplay and best cinematography. “American Beauty” was largely beloved.

Except, we don’t talk much about it these days. When we discuss the great films of 1999, our minds leap to “The Matrix,” “The Sixth Sense” or myriad other great films...but not the film that took home the Oscar. The film often appears on lists of the most overrated films of all time, and there’s a general consensus that its edgy premise now feels overwrought and ham-fisted. And that’s before we have to deal with the Kevin Spacey of it all. 

When I first saw “American Beauty,” it knocked me on my ass. It came near the end of a formative cinematic year. I was 20 years old and just venturing out from a life of sheltered viewing. “American Beauty” was my first exposure to a film that suggested with such vivid detail and humor the gaping hole in suburban souls. It felt brave and subversive, told with an energy and humor that propelled it through its darkest moments. I wasn’t reviewing films at the time, but I remember thinking it was absolutely the best film of the year. 

And then – I didn’t watch it again until recently. 

So which is it: Is “American Beauty” the masterpiece many said it was in 1999 (although let’s remember that, like any Oscar winner, it still had its vocal critics)? Or is it an embarrassing relic that we should throw in the pile with other pieces of Cancel Culture? 

It’s not that easy. And I think the only way we can discuss it is to do what the movie’s marketing asked us and look closer. 

A problematic protagonist 

So, let’s talk about Lester Burnham. 

“American Beauty” is narrated by Kevin Spacey’s protagonist, who introduces us to his Midwestern neighborhood and informs us that he is 42 years old, married with a wife and kid, and will be dead in less than a year. Of course, Lester says, he’s pretty much dead already, just floating through his day-to-day existence that includes a loveless marriage and a lifeless job. His daily highlight is pleasuring himself in the shower. He jolts back to life when he meets Angela (Mena Suvari), his teenage daughter’s new friend. Entranced by this young beauty, Lester finds himself with a new purpose — to sleep with Angela. 

It’s an icky premise, even before you factor in the allegations that have damned Spacey’s career. It’s a comedy situated on statutory rape, a movie that I have to imagine would have a very difficult time making it to the screen today. And watching it as a 45-year-old father of two is much different than watching it as a single 20 year old; the humor that I found so subversive and edgy back then just feels gross now, and we’ve suffered through so much ironic musing on suburban life since then that the freshness has worn thin. 

Spacey’s performance, which won him an Oscar, is charismatic, funny and likable. Lester has a jaded outlook, pushing back when his bosses ask him to write a memo justifying his job, throwing passive aggressive shade at his wife. When Lester wakes up, as it were, the performance goes full-on comedic. Mendes gets big laughs out of Lester bumbling around Angela and asks us to cheer Lester on as he blackmails his boss and loafs around at home, smoking pot and buying himself a sports car (Lester’s fist-up “I rule!” made me cackle in my younger days; now, it makes me roll my eyes). 

Spacey’s performance is good, mind you, it’s just badly calibrated. The film portrays Lester as a put-upon hero but, in reality, he’s an asshole. He berates his wife, cons his employer out of a year’s severance and spends the better part of a year scheming to have sex with a teenage girl. “I’m just a guy with nothing to lose,” he says at one point. But it’s not true; Lester’s a 42-year-old dude with a mid-life crisis and instead of settling only for the sports car, he becomes a self-centered dick. 

I don’t think the movie is intended as an apology or endorsement for Lester. But Spacey delivers a performance that is so funny and energetic that we can’t help but like him, even if what he desires is terrible. But there’s a key flaw in the movie’s final moments, which we’ll get to, that refuses to give him the comeuppance he needs. 

But for now, I do think that “American Beauty” is well aware that Lester is a selfish asshole. Because almost everyone in this movie is. 

Suburbia as performance art 

Despite the fact that “American Beauty” was released a half-decade before anyone first liked anything on Facebook, it feels like a strong fit with the social media age. Its characters are constantly aware and concerned about how others perceive them and where their stories fit into society. Everyone has an ache in their soul that they’re trying to salve by crafting the ideal personality. “There’s nothing worse than being ordinary,” Angela says. Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat didn’t create our anxieties over image or success; they simply amplified them. 

No character is more indicative of this than realtor Carolyn Burnham (Annette Benning), who is so obsessed with projecting an image of competency and success that Lester informs us she purposefully coordinates her gardening gloves with her pruning shears. Even as her marriage deteriorates and her daughter Jane (Thora Birch) creates further distance with her parents, Carolyn strives to maintain an image of success. Dinner is meticulously curated, with light jazz playing in the background and candles lit. Carolyn drags Lester to conferences and dinners so that her competitors and potential clients can see that she has a perfect balance of work and home life. Early in the film, we watch her obsessively scrub and clean a home and aggressively try to sell it. When she fails, she berates and abuses herself. 

Benning gives the film’s strongest performance. You can almost see Carolyn straining to hold her image together as her life collapses. Lester views her as cold and aloof, and maybe that’s a little true. But Benning captures a desperation that makes Carolyn heartbreaking and tragic. Success at home and work is so essential that it’s driving her mad; when she embarks on an affair with her competitor (a wonderfully oily Peter Gallagher), it’s not so much spurred on so much by sex as by her desire that someone successful sees her as an equal and as desirable. When the relationship implodes, it’s easy to understand why she spirals into despair; identities based on success are houses of cards. Remove one, and everything collapses. 

Nearly all of the film’s characters are trying to perform and create some sort of identity that makes them stand out. Angela brags about being a model and having sex with older men because it makes her provocative, desirable. Gallagher’s Real Estate King presents himself as, by turns, a business savant and a brokenhearted boyfriend as he seduces Carolyn. Next-door neighbor Col. Fitz (Chris Cooper) has fashioned himself as a conservative hardass, particularly enraged at the growing acceptance of same-sex attraction in his community, but it’s revealed to be a façade that hides his own shame and self-hatred. 

The harder the characters try to keep up the fiction and deny that they don’t have it all together, the more self-centered they get. “American Beauty” understands the ache in our soul that makes us fear we’re not special, the desire to transcend our everyday existence, the fear that we’ll be judged mediocre. And it understands that our culture has become so obsessed with this that we’ve encouraged lives that are obsessed with self. Late in the film, Carolyn has a near nervous breakdown in her car, brandishing a handgun and listening to an audiobook about the power of “me-centric living.” Everyone is trying to pursue their own version of happiness and success, and when we’re that self-centered, disaster is inevitable. 

“American Beauty’s” most powerful moments come when it examines the sad fallout of all this performing. Despite its provocative premise and subversive humor, the film’s message is fairly traditional: we are so focused on self and identity and so desperate to fill a void that American culture has created, that we are killing our families and communities. The film’s most heartbreaking scene comes when it appears Lester and Carolyn have reached a brief détente and are about to reconcile on the couch, but their amorous activities are interrupted because Carolyn doesn’t want beer spilled on her furniture.

And, the film argues, when adults are focused on themselves, the ones who suffer are the children. Suvari is fantastic as Angela; when I was younger, I thought that the actress was overplaying the teen’s vapidness, but watching it again, I see how Suvari is completely aware of the performance Angela is giving. When the façade is dropped in the film’s final moments and we see the insecurity that drives her, it’s a powerful moment. Birch gives the most real and quietly nuanced performance in the film as the Burnham’s daughter, terrified of being mediocre in a culture obsessed with success. Bentley is also really strong here; Ricky is confident, but it’s a quiet confidence, and introspectiveness that none of the other characters have. He’s the only character comfortable in his own skin, the one who the film argues sees the world most clearly, his heart breaking for his angry father and a mother who’s been so neglected she’s a shell of a person (Allison Janney, purposefully obscuring her limitless charisma, is fantastic). 

Technical mastery 

One of the arguments that I often see leveled against “American Beauty” is that it’s too on the nose in its critiques of American life. Admittedly, the movie is far from subtle; but I think we tend to place too high a value on subtlety. Sometimes, you need a bit of theatrics 

And Mendes, in his feature debut, gives them. His background as a stage director is on full display here, as Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall create a gorgeous suburbia that purposefully feels a bit stagebound. After all, this is where these characters perform. Several scenes, including the dinner scenes with the Burnhams, are blocked like plays, with the three characters sitting in such a way that we can almost see the imagined fourth wall between them and the audience. It’s oft-mocked, but the use of roses and the color red is highly effective, especially on repeat viewings when you notice them showing up largely in scenes involving the family, where Lester’s joy is finally rekindled. 

Mendes and Hall ably navigate three different visual modes. The film’s more traditional dramatic scenes take place in a flatly lit suburbia and Lester’s fantasies take place in a lusher, more extravagant setting, capturing his desire and vivacity returning to life. Hall also uses harsher digital footage via Ricky’s camera to expose the few moments of true honesty and beauty the characters see, whether it’s the unfairly mocked bag blowing in the wind or a kitchen conversation between Lester and Jane. All of this is punctuated by Thomas Newman’s iconic score, which captures the film's evocative and quirky feel. 

“American Beauty” is a film made by a director at the beginning of a strong cinematic career, and it’s gorgeously composed and presented. Add to that a strong ensemble, with Benning delivering the best performance of her career followed by capable work by Cooper, Birch, Suvari and Bentley. It’s a film that, on the surface, is compelling and beautiful. 

So why do I still hesitate when I consider its quality? 

Look closer

Like the suburban world it critiques, “American Beauty” looks great on the surface, with its meticulous direction and capable acting. But it’s a film that exists on a faulty structure, with a fatal flaw in how it deals with its main character. 

Ball’s script is by turns funny, insightful and touching. But structurally, it’s a bit of a mess. The camcorder footage that opens it, in which Jane asks Ricky to kill her dad (later in the film, we see it’s an act), was originally meant to play into a subplot where the two are on trial for Lester’s murder. But without that subplot, it’s largely pointless. On first view, it might set up suspense over Ricky’s intentions. On repeat viewings, it’s superfluous. Jane is hurt by her parents’ lack of attention, but not homicidal. And while there is a violent backstory in Ricky’s past, it’s clarified well before Lester’s death, so that we’re never really anticipating that he will kill Lester. 

Ball’s screenplay brings several of the characters to breaking points. Angela almost has her virginity taken by her friend’s father. Carolyn, her affair discovered, sits sobbing in a car brandishing a gun before coming home to find her dead husband. Col. Fitz is revealed to be a closeted gay man. Ricky and Jane are on their way to New York when they find Lester dead in the kitchen. 

All of these characters have moments of crises that alter or destroy their worlds. But the film’s main character is left a martyr. 

It’s a risk to center a film on a man whose behavior is so off-putting, and “American Beauty” navigates that by having Spacey portray Lester as a put-upon, depressed everyman who gets his spark back. We cheer him on as he takes on authority and culture, and it’s admittedly easy to like a character who always has a snarky quip at the ready. But the film fails by not having a moment where Lester has to deal with the gravity of his situation and who he becomes. 

When he realizes that the fantasy he’s pursuing is more fraught than he realized, and that Angela is just a scared, insecure little girl, Lester rightfully walks away from the situation. He tells Angela she has nothing to feel guilty or stupid about, and he’s right. But where’s the moment that he realizes his own faults and flaws? Where’s the recognition or horror that he was about to do a really awful thing, and the reflection that he needs some strong psychological help? 

Instead, the aborted sex just teaches Lester he already has a wonderful family that he should be appreciative of. He gets to bask in a few moments of being a good, loving father and be bemused about snapping out of his midlife crisis. 

Yes, Lester is killed. But his death feels less like a consequence for his actions and more a commentary on the crazy little suburban world Ball feels that he’s created. Instead of forcing Lester to look closer at his own situation, the movie gives him a moment of catharsis and then has him ruminate on the beauty of life, thinking back to his wife and daughter as his soul leaves his body so that moviegoers can leave the theater with some sort of psychological or philosophical uplift. 

Does this ending just sit poorly with me in an age where sexual assault is daily news and Kevin Spacey has been alleged to have done horrible things? Perhaps. But I feel like it’s also a cop out on the movie’s part to avoid dealing with a difficult protagonist. Rather than let his life fall apart and have him face the consequences, or be changed by his experiences and have to try to start the hard road of improving and dealing with his issues, the film gives Lester the benefit of becoming a tragic hero. It lets him off too easily and instead lets the other characters — who are flawed, yes, but possibly more sympathetic — have their lives ruined. And it never resolves the tension we feel between the film’s lighthearted tone and the disturbing sexual undercurrents. 

Does it make “American Beauty” a bad movie? No; I think there’s a lot here that works. Some of the performances are all-timers, and Mendes’ direction is gorgeous. Ball’s script is snappy and smart in places; another pass might have cleared up those structural concerns. Was it the year’s best movie? Not necessarily. “The Matrix” and “Fight Club” handled the issues of American ennui and aimlessness much better, and “Election” was more trenchant and funny in its depictions of sex, mid-life crises and suburbia. “Office Space” did better at tackling the emptiness of corporate culture and, hell, “The Sixth Sense” might have been more adept at using red as symbolism. 

But “American Beauty” isn’t as horrible as some like to declare, nor is it the masterpiece many thought it was 25 years ago. It’s a perfectly fine film that could have been great with a more sensitive handling of its central character. If you look closer, you’ll see a film more nuanced, flawed and worthy of discussion than we often give it credit for.