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American Beauty
viewed September 25, 199 at AMC Van Ness
This is the best new movie I've seen so far this
year, but that's not saying much. If you
"look closer", as the ads say, at the movie
itself, you really don't have much more than a satire
that knows a lot about its subject -- the suburbs -- and
knows how to cut it down (especially the women) but
finally falls short of something extraordinary.
I have to admit that in spite the ending of nihilism
disguised as sublimeness, there's much to like about the
way the film audaciously raises issues of suburban life
and capitalism, with fantastic performances across the board (two
unforgettable portrayals in particular).
Kevin Spacey has a ball as Lester Burnham, the career
corporate stooge who, through a couple of encounters
with his daughter's nubile friend and his new neighbor's
startlingly calm-voiced son, quits his job, blackmails
his boss for $60,000 and gets a job at a burger joint.
It's not an easy task for Spacey, making his pedophilic fantasies
about his daughter's friend agreeable to the American
audience, but he does it. Perhaps he wins our
sympathies by prefacing his period of gushing lust with
a shrug-shouldered display of helpless cynicism.
When he envisions his 13-year old love object beckoning
from a bed of rose petals, I heard chuckles in the
audience that seemed to resonate with recognition more
than scorn. It's a testament to Spacey's talents
to make us like a guy who's so innately pathetic and
perverse, by convincing us believe that his perversions
are a means of empowerment.
It would seem at first that his desire is physical, but as the story unfolds it seems he's
really after what she represents: youth, vitality,
promise, the things he has lost. And so we actually
have a startling claim that pedophilia, child porn and
the like are the expressions of lost youth attempting to
be recaptured by the purveyors of such activities.
Furthermore, the movie claims, the ideology that spawns
such devious acts is the same that drives people to work
out obsessively (which Lester also does due to his lusty
inspiration). The movie tries to mask such
implications, but it's hard to do so when Lester's wet
dreams are so boldly and colorfully dealt to the screen.
Wes Bentley is the real discovery of this film.
His eyes, conveying his steely, morbid, confidence, give
the film its soul. Bentley plays his role
perfectly; the character of
Ricky Fitts itself invites skepticism. Exuding
confidence and mystic nothingness as he sells drugs,
shirks work and urges his girlfriend to run away from
home, is a character that seems too seductively
likeable, as if he were the new psychic guru for our
troubled times. Perhaps his most intriguing scene
is when he offers to kill Lester, his girlfriend's
father. It's left too ambiguous as to how serious
he was in offering his services (the scene is presented
twice, once at the beginning, to serve the story with
some cheap suspense), as if the film shied away from
Ricky's dark side for fear of risking his status as the
healer figure.
Annette Bening makes a minor miracle by transforming
a thankless cardboard role as a soulless, workaholic
mother into someone worth following. I kept hoping
for that moment when she would be given her own chance
for self-discovery, and part of the massive let-down of the ending is that she is never given that chance.
Nonetheless, she proves that she's simply one of the
most talented actresses working today, which isn't bad
considering her character is merely a foil for Kevin
Spacey's antics.
Though some would consider it too soft a turn from
the film's hard edges, I really liked Lester's act of
good will at the end; I guess it resonated with the humanist
in me. I preferred that moment to how the
plot falls apart after it. If they were going to
have courage and confidence finally emerge from Lester,
which would set up a promising, climactic convening of family
members, with the result perhaps offering something
other than cynical alienation, why did
they blow such a payoff scene away with a gunshot and
sunny voice-over epilogue? The film, like Spacey
in the early scenes, seems to suffering from the same
cynicism and failure to connect that it criticizes.
It can't go out with a
hard earned understanding among its characters, but with
a melodramatic bang, and bittersweet tranquility.
Read
Roger Ebert's more generous review of this film
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