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They told he should get out more, so he went to the cinema to see American Beauty.
The film starts. Immediately, we get a grainy, VHS-style image. It’s night. A teenage girl, lying on a bed, is talking to the guy with the camera about how she hates her dad for his lustful desires on her best mate. In fact, she hates him so much, she almost wishes him dead. Cut straight away to a cloud-strewn sky, a few days later. Kevin Spacey does a voice-over as the camera tracks down to leafy, middle class American Suburbia. He’s Lester Burnham. He’s dead. And he’s going to tell you about the last few months of his life …
To be honest, if you go to see this film, there is every chance you’ll find the first half-hour or so nasty, amoral and deeply, bleakly pessimist about life and its chances. We follow Lester’s progression from a starting base as a deeply unsatisfied sexual inadequate: a whiny, brow-beaten suburban husband with an increasingly artificial wife and a daughter who finds both of them unbearably alien and uncaring. He moves through the film on a voyage of twisted self-realisation, destroying all the above in a juvenile, sleazy, self-gratifying and socially irresponsible way.
You’ll sympathise with him. Despite the film’s constant portrayal of their screaming inadequacies, you’ll sympathise with all of them — Carolyn (Annette Bening), the desperate, obsessive, materialist estate-agent wife. Jane (Thora Birch — I’ve not heard of her before but she was good), the deliberately misfit daughter who seemingly can’t articulate anything bar spite and jealousy. Next-door neighbour Ricky (the similarly good Wes Bentley — no, I’ve not heard of him before either), an edgy, camcorder-wielding voyeur whose dispassionate obsession with the “beauty” in everything draws Jane towards him. His dad, the ex-Army nutcase who beats him regularly, and whose constant paranoid scrutiny of Ricky for any supposed drugs- or sexuality-related perversion causes his son to develop a weirdly secretive, meticulous method of living.
All these twisted, nasty, self serving characters are given an individual dignity that pulls in the viewer irresistibly. And that’s no mean feat when the film’s main purpose often appears to be that of hacking violently and randomly at the different ways of thinking and being in the middle class US, whether Right, Left, moral, amoral, young, old, rebellious or conformist. Somehow, the only prominent characters it’s hard to like in at least some way are the gay couple who live next-door to the Burnham’s war-zone. They’re the only people to talk of or truly live in a community, the only people who seem to offer friendship not based on deeply self-serving and unattractive motives, yet they’re somehow distant, alien. It’s not that they’re in any way objectionable for their sexuality — quite the opposite, in fact. Their homosexuality does not make them the “queers” and “perverts” that Ricky’s dad seems to react to so passionately. That you feel nothing at all for them is because of their ‘normalness’, their conventionality.
And that’s what this film is about. It’s about the quest for the ‘unusual’ in the ‘normal’, about self worth and deliberate alienation, a meditation on man’s inhumanity to man, and its roots in his inhumanity to himself. That alone justifies this review’s place in a ‘religious’ magazine. Director Sam Mendes (English, 25, only worked in theatre before — yes, it’s someone else you haven’t heard of) uses the film to cut jaggedly at the wrong in the world yet maintains a love for those caught up in it. He discerns the guilty, yet does not throw away their capacity for acts of passionate feeling and sincerity so irrationally exciting that you might just end up with a daft smirk on your face when you least expect it — notably the “plastic bag moment”, part of Ricky’s constant meditations on beauty that initially seems trite, but chimes with the rest of the film in unexpected ways. All this — individual dignity, love despite the twistedness of the world — is stuff that Christianity ought to have the common sense to pick up on from within its own message, within the Christ who teaches it. This film is not aiming to preach, but it damn well manages to teach: not an obvious, straight-ahead lesson as such, but an attitude to the rest of the world that is worth paying attention to.
Despite its intelligent alter-egos as both a moral meditation and a ribald satire, American Beauty is also a straightforward, entertaining film. Most of that comedy comes from the embarrassing, the inappropriate or the puerile. But you will genuinely laugh, and it will at times genuinely make you happy. I particularly enjoyed its cunning and clever soundtrack, using songs both as musical evocation and lyrical reference point, notably the Who track The Seeker. Ultimately, though, I shall always remember the last moments of the film, the final payoff in which Spacey’s character, however ambiguously, gets a semi-justificatory ‘meaning’ for life.
Who killed Lester Burnham? The film hides this last secret, tricks you and confuses you right to the end. You won’t ultimately care too much, but you’ll go away caring and worrying for all the main characters in this film, including the killer. Please see it. It will play Silly Buggers with your head, but sometimes that’s a good thing.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005