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Wow! A Masterpiece!
Our lives are tinged with illusion, pretense, and fear. American
Beauty explores the dark, comic, tragic, and ironic aspects of our
dread to truly know ourselves. We pretend we are someone we’re not. We
desperately cling to the sweet lies we force ourselves to live, and we
only succeed in becoming more lonely and estranged. To salve the empty
yearning, we often fall into the allure of sexual musing and fantasy. What
the sages of the sixties often called the despair of inauthenticity forms
the ironic core of the upper middle class suburban life of American
Beauty. The crimson petals of the American Beauty rose form a fitting
symbol of the primordial power of the tempestuous goddess of love. Red
rose buds and petals festoon the sexual fantasies Lester Burnham indulges
on the path to his awakening.
The movie opens with Lester’s (Kevin Spacey) narration: "In less
than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet. And in a way,
I'm dead already." Any one of the fragile psyches in his world might
do him in.
He might do it himself. We are left wondering who and why. The
movie shows us just how tenuous it all is.
The characters of American Beauty air their white, middle class
stereotypical foibles so charmingly that even the most bitter and angry,
or even criminal drug dealers win our empathy. We laugh, judge, even rage
against the characters, yet if we are open and allow this movie to work
its magic, it leaps to a profound level where we see the characters as
whole, human, fragile, broken, but each in their own way beautiful. Their
neuroses are sufficiently varied that we will find some facet of our own
pretentiousness and travail portrayed sympathetically. That is powerful
story writing. That is wonderful acting. That is masterful directing and
cinematic craft.
American Beauty has been marketed as a story about racy aspects of
sex and flirtation. Lester fantasizes about his daughter’s teenage
girlfriend (Mena Suvari). The daughter (Thora Birch) gives her virginity
to the drug-dealing voyeur next door (Wes Bentley). Lester's wife (Annette
Bening) shacks up with the local "King of Real Estate" (Peter
Gallagher) on her march to self-esteem and vanquishing her status as a victim.
The marine Colonel (Chris Cooper), father of the boy next door, is
homophobic, violent, rigid, and indifferent to his nearly catatonic wife
(Allison Janney). He probably created her condition. All of these
characters are involved in the sturm and drang of sexual friction. All
except the daughter and the drug-dealing neighbor find their destruction
in some aspect of their illusions about what their sex means.
We won’t spoil a surprise, but the film allows us to witness powerful
enactment of a classic moral that it is indeed destructive to couple with
another with whom one shares no genuine bond. In a moment of profound
wonderment, one of the characters disengages from sex not because it’s
wrong due to some conventional taboo, but because engaging in lustful sex
would be furthering the lies that each had projected about the other.
Moral lessons are rarely communicated by finger wagging, pulpit
banging, dogma spouting, or even reasoning. We have a chance to embrace
lessons of the moral suasion most easily when we are swept into the lives
of characters, experience their temptation and delusion, and conclude with
them that to act as they do is destructive to ourselves and to others. Is
that not the essence of the golden rule, one that is simple to state, but
complex to live? This movie, in often odd, quirky, and unconventional
ways, does unto others as one should do unto oneself with grace, subtlety,
irony, and style.
Don’t misunderstand our focus on the moral heart of the film as a way
of disregarding its clever, insightful depiction of the pratfalls and
despair of suburban life. Through many hilarious moments, Lester, a suppressed
bumbler who works at a soul sucking job, comes home each night to a
loveless and passionless marriage and skirmishes with a hostile teenage
daughter. He chucks it all to regain his life by spending his days
recapturing the freer moments of his youth and "wailing on his
pecs" with a garage bench press and weights to the loud sounds of Pink Floyd.
The message is not entirely hopeful for those of us past our youth. The
chance to live with love, integrity, and passion is held out for the
younger generation: Lester's daughter Jane and her new-found love, and
Jane's sexually brash, hard talking friend Angela. It is not clear that
they will escape the trap of their parents, but it is possible that they
can achieve genuine American Beauty.
If those of us who watch the movie can treat the dark warnings as
harbingers of hope,
there is much that can stimulate meaningful discussion and exploration.
However, before beginning a conversation that might easily degenerate into
an accusatory session of "you are so much like Lester or his
wife", it might be best to do a bit of internal inventory of our own
state of illusion and despair.
In the end, just when we began to see Lester’s freedom from the
chains of denial, he is shot, but even death is unmasked of its cliché.
We didn’t feel that Lester had anywhere else to go in his life. He
became born anew and had given himself to his world, but his world didn’t
seem to have either the heart or soul to accept him. Death, then, becomes
the ultimate freedom and his reward for daring to be brave and live the
truth of his character.
We have come to expect stellar performances from Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening,
Peter Gallagher, and Chris Cooper. We were delighted with the support of
the teenagers, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, and Mena Suvari. The
extraordinary depth of their portrayals turns otherwise unsympathetic
ciphers into our friends or at least neighbors. When we root for them, we
might in fact be rooting for ourselves.
Bravo and roll out the Oscar nominations. We are especially delighted
that DreamWorks has finally backed a film with real story power
that seems to be growing into a box office success.
(The official web site is shared by DreamWorks and Amazon.com, and it
contains interviews and additional merchandising links.)
We
welcome your comments!
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