Critical Backlash:
Unmasking American Beauty

(Continued)

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They certainly treat Lester better than they do his wife, Caroline, whom the filmmakers try to score points off whenever they can, even when it doesn't make any sense to do so. She's frigid and she's adulterous, she's an uptight perfectionist and a failure at her job, she shows no tact when dealing with her daughter, and she even slaps her when she talks back, she's self-hating, and she even has horrible taste in music. Annette Bening, who gave one of last year's best performances in Neil Jordan's underrated thriller In Dreams, can't do anything in this role (apart from some pyrotechnic facial contortions, which are preferable in every way to Kevin Spacey's smug, self-satisfied smile and all-knowing eye-rolling), because Alan Ball hasn't written her a character. He's jumbled together a number of superficial incidents for her to go through, but he hasn't laid down any solid foundations. Ball betrays his origins as a sitcom writer. American Beauty is an example of television thinking aestheticized by a stage director. Unfortunately, no one involved thought to bring a real filmmaker along for the ride.

I'm not sure any kind of filmmaker could've done anything with the sentimental, creepy teen-romance subplot. The movie's opening has already set Ricky Fitts up by exploiting our anxiety over a thinning line between teens who fantasize about violence and teens who actually plan and carry out violent actions. The filmmaker's exploitation of this fear is shameful, but their overall conception of Ricky Fitts as a dramatic character shames only their own imaginative faculties. Ricky comes off as a masochistic sicko, for whom the experience of beauty goes hand-in-hand with the experience of pain (American Beauty secretly wants to be Fight Club). He's such a ridiculously contrived character, but Ball expects us to buy into this idea of a battered, emotionally unbalanced child, who has somehow managed to turn himself into a responsible, capable, admirable drug dealer and to achieve a sense of complete self-confidence in any situation (even when he's getting beaten by his father who suspects him of a number of transgressions, including drug dealing, theft, and homosexuality). Of course the movie never bothers to explain why this kid who has it so together doesn't have the foresight to set his pager on vibrate when he's eating dinner with his parents.

Ball never allows his screenplay to be overrun by plot logic. Instead, contrived twists fill the spaces between superficial revelations, and nothing ever seems to add up. This has to be one of the only movies ever made where a bad sight gag leads to the main character's death.

In Tantrum's penultimate chapter, a near infidelity snaps Leo back into physical adulthood, and he runs naked from the shadow of adultery and back to his wife. Leo's attempt to find happiness through infantilism fails, and he finds himself once again facing the same responsibilities that weighed so heavily on him at the beginning of the book. At the end of American Beauty, Lester aborts a sexual encounter with his daughter's best friend because she reveals to him that she's a virgin (boys will be boys, but, hey, good boys know when to stop, right?). Presumably Lester would've felt no need to stop if the young woman, Angela, really was the slut she led Lester and her friends (and the audience) to believe she was (why haven't any feminists picked up on this movie's blatant misogyny?). The filmmakers don't present this scene as Lester coming to his senses: once again they want us to applaud Lester, this time for the maturity and clarity of his decision, and for the tender way he treats Angela after gently rejecting her advances.

The movie's celebration of a character who consciously rids his life of any values besides those determined by his own adolescent desires and whose hair-splitting moral maneuvering masquerades as a admirable ability to keep things in perspective makes American Beauty the first movie I've seen with a Clintonian morality. Quite a few movies released last year attempted to deal with essential aspects of American life. We had some masterful successes, Three Kings, The Straight Story, and Cookie's Fortune; engaging and amusing doodles, like South Park and Dick; interesting failures, like Bringing Out the Dead and Boys Don't Cry; maddeningly awful failures like Magnolia and Snow Falling on Cedars. However, only American Beauty seems really symptomatic of American culture. Where Feiffer's Tantrum is satire that transcends its purpose as satire (its working at the same level as Philip Roth's novel The Anatomy Lesson and Paul Mazursky's film Blume in Love), American Beauty purports to be satire, but ends up satirizing only its filmmakers' shallow intentions, their superficial ideas.

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Jonathan Hastings lives and writes in Burlington, Vermont.