American Beauty (film)
American Beauty (Directed by Sam Mendes)/1999
American Beauty had such a massive
impact on popular art-cinema that at times it seems a bit of a cliché. It has
the weird depressed artistic kid, the self-help infatuated business people,
the hyper-sexualised blonde girl, the emasculated dad, the evil corporate boss,
and the repressed homophobic military man. Yet, I think the feeling of cliché
that can affect the viewer of this movie is mostly the result of the influence it had
on how the disaffection of modern American culture was portrayed in the television
shows and movies that followed rather than due to an inherent flaw in the movie.
This is a movie about the
meaninglessness of modern American life. It shows the breakdown of the family
unit, where all family members are against each other in a domestic cold-war.
Individuals working in companies are treated without respect and do not feel
any purpose and hence motivation to perform their job well. Those that do feel
passion for their work do so out of a lack of true self-esteem and embrace a
self-help, Tony Robbins type culture that comes across as extremely odious to
those that see through the mask of professionalism. Youth are depressed and
disconnected from their parents; those that have a more creative streak are out
casted by materialistis in the school system and readily engage in devious behaviour.
Old school Americans feel lost in a system that no longer respects toughness
and stoicism but are unable to embrace the emotional and sexual liberalism of
the modern world.
American Beauty attempts to
capture the malaise of modern America and provides somewhat extreme versions of
the different manifestations that this takes. Watching this movie I was struck
by the fact that every character in this movie was white and middle-class. In
this sense, American Beauty is limited by the fact that it is a presentation of
the ills only affecting a small and privileged group within a wealthy,
developed country. This fact could be viewed as reflecting the fundamental
immaturity of the individuals portrayed as they are not able to enjoy their
privilege. On the other hand, suffering is always subjective, and all humans
face pain in their own way, framed by the circumstances that shape their lives.
It therefore displays the confusion and absurdity of a very specific social
class, but does not act as a more robust statement on humanity as a whole.
One key point in American Beauty
is the role of sexuality. Individuals are shown to seek refuge from their lives
through sex: both fantasy and real. The movie displays the futility of this
approach. The fantasy either will not meet our expectations, or will die off
into another form of boredom or pain. There is no real redemptive quality to
this message: no one seems to transcend it or come to terms with the reality of
it. Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey, seems to encounter this head-on
later in the movie, but this experience hardly plays an important role in the
development of his life or character nor of the movie.
The weakness of the movie lays in
its beginning and conclusion, which both involve Lester speaking of his past
life as if in some kind of afterlife. This is the narrative technique used, but
is not properly incorporated into the rest of the movie or explained. Possibly
the movie was saying that the foolishness of life is only fully seen by those
that have ceased living, or that there is some kind of religious meaning to all
the suffering that plays out in human life. However, it has the feeling of
something tacked onto the movie without much reflection on what it is meant to
portray.
Finally, the bleakness of the
message is made viewer friendly due to the fine work of the director, Sam
Mendes. It is shot in a soft, playful and stylistically lush way. The colours are
bright and the movie is upbeat. All of this led to the huge popularity of this
movie as while presenting a harsh message, American Beauty is an enjoyable,
playful and humorous film.
