American Beauty (1999)

Tagline:
…look closer.

Wide Release Date:
September 15, 1999

Directed by:
Sam Mendes
Written by:
Alan Ball
Produced by:
Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks

Starring:
Kevin Spacey
Annette Bening
Thora Birch
Allison Janney
Peter Gallagher
Mena Suvari
Wes Bentley
Chris Cooper

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I saw this while scrolling through Netflix and, even though I knew it was vaguely about a statutory rape near-miss, I decided to go for it anyway since it won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1999 and, despite all the bullshit surrounding him, I still like Kevin Spacey’s work.

This is also the movie with the floating plastic bag, right? Family Guy referenced that once.

THE 600(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is dissatisfied with his life. His marriage is dead and his job as a media executive sucks. Carolyn (Annette Bening), Lester’s wife, is equally dissatisfied in her marriage and puts all her focus on her stressful job as a real estate agent. Jane (Thora Birch) is their teenage daughter who hates both of them. Ricky (Wes Bentley) is the Burnham’s new teenage next door neighbor, who has dozens of video tapes of his hobby of creepin’ on people and a nice marijuana-dealing side gig. Angela (Mena Suvari) is Jane’s mean-girl best friend who doesn’t do much except look attractive to middle-aged men. That covers the main cast. Ricky’s parents are Frank (Chris Cooper), a self-loathing closeted homosexual retired marine colonel who abuses Ricky, and Barbara (Allison Janney), an unemotional zombie. Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher) is Carolyn’s real estate agency business rival. That about covers the side cast. Scott Bakula is in this movie too!

Let the antics begin! Lester becomes infatuated with Angela after watching her cheerleader routine at a high school basketball game (fantasies with rose petals and all). Angela picks up on this quickly and starts enabling him. Lester overhears a conversation between Angela and Jane where Angela says that she would fuck him if he got in shape, so he does just that. Feeling empowered, Lester quits his job and blackmails his boss into providing a very nice severance package. He buys a Pontiac Firebird, gets an easy job at a fast food restaurant, and starts smoking Ricky’s pot. He becomes happier as the movie progresses.

Happiness is relative, of course.

Carolyn has an affair with Buddy Kane, and takes her down to the shooting range one day which she finds positively exhilirating. After Lester discovers their affair at the fast food restaurant’s drive-thru window (and not caring that much about it whatsoever), Kane ends the affair and Carolyn feels embarrassed for everything.

Jane starts going out with Ricky, which strains her friendship with Jane. They hit it off nicely; Ricky finds Jane beautiful (he finds everything beautiful except Angela).

Ricky had videotaped footage of Lester working out shirtless in his garage, which Frank finds and then starts assuming his son is one of those filthy cocksuckers that he hates so damn much. Later, through the window, Frank sees what he mistaken believes is Ricky sucking Lester off, but he was really just dealing him pot. A quick confrontation with his son, where Frank beats the shit out of him, ends with Frank kicking him out of the house indefinitely and then crying.

When Angela becomes jealous of all the time Jane and Ricky are spending together, Ricky calls Angela “ordinary” which really sets her off in a tailspin.

Frank visits Lester in the garage only to start breaking down in front of him. After a comforting hug, Frank kisses Lester. A surprised Lester pushes Frank away gently and tells him that he’s not gay. Frank numbly staggers back out of the garage.

This isn’t half-bad, actually.

Lester returns to the house to find a distraught Angela. He tells her that she’s anything but ordinary, which is everything she apparently ever wanted to hear. The almost have sex until Angela admits she’s a virgin, which completely snaps Lester out of his lust (in a semi-good way though; probably sees her as some sort of beautiful, untouched, delicate flower now). They have a moment where they vent their respective frustrations. Angela asks Lester how he’s doing, and he’s stunned by a question he hasn’t heard in a long, long time. He’s smiles and says that he’s better than he’s been in a while. When Angela excuses herself to the bathroom, Lester gets shot in the back of the head and killed by an unknown assailant (later revealed to be Frank).

Lester’s voiceover assures the audience that there’s so much beauty that can be appreciated in the world! We all have a good laugh.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — General Movie Thoughts

I’m torn on how I feel about American Beauty. Let’s completely ignore the reprehensibly creepy dad-in-love-with-his-daughter’s-friend plot for now. On one hand, bringing the focus to the seedy underbelly of suburban life by watching (most) of these characters fall apart at the seams was on point. Also, finding the beauty in everything, even the ugly and the mundane, is a good, healthy life lesson. God knows I find beauty in the ugliest music in existence, so I know what it’s like to be able to take the step back and experience it from such a perspective. Certainly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One man’s trash (Ricky’s view of Angela) is another man’s treasure (Lester’s view of Angela). On the other hand, this being an Oscar winner for Best Picture seems awfully weird, and my gut feeling on that tells me that either the movie hasn’t aged well or the public perception of the movie back in 1999 hasn’t aged well. Also, Kevin Spacey wanted to fuck his daughter’s friend. Gross.

I thought the tagline “…look closer.” seemed strange to me until I thought about it a little bit more. Ricky was obviously the best at looking closer, being the most confident and self-actualized character in the movie. He wasn’t confused about who he was, what he wanted, or what he valued like pretty much the rest of the cast. He was able to look at a bag in the wind and find something stunning and life-changing about it. And good for him, more power to ya. I certainly don’t find a bag dancing around particularly beautiful, but Ricky does without an ounce of cynicism. He is able to look closer, even finding the beauty in a half-smiling dead man. As an audience we can see where he’s coming from… if you look closer.

But that doesn’t make his face any less creepy.

Kevin Spacey’s dead carcass is so beautiful it should be in a museum!

I was pleasantly surprised, and relieved, that the entire focus of Lester’s character isn’t with his inappropriate infatuation with a teenager. Be that as it may, his scene with Angela was brutally uncomfortable even if it ended with the realization that Lester found beauty in her purity and didn’t really want to bone her. So that’s cool. Maybe that part aged like fine milk, because 1999 was the era of “COUNTING DOWN UNTIL THE OLSEN TWINS TURN 18, HIGH FIVE BROTHER” and we don’t do that shit anymore. Ain’t like in 2024 we’re all like “WHEN IS MILLIE BOBBY BROWN LEGAL?” Do you know why? Because she’s 20 right now. Dipshit. And she’s too young for you, so don’t even think about it.

Suburban nightmare. The “look closer” theme applies to the oppressiveness of suburban life once you peel back the layers. This kind of inside look into the drama and dissatisfaction with normal pretend-to-be-happy people was relatively groundbreaking at a time when the economy was thriving, Bill “Blowjob” Clinton was president, and everything seemed absolutely ok. Showing a lack of fulfillment with the American Dream in the ’90s was not something people did, and this movie flipped that on its head. Doesn’t seem like a big deal in this day and age, right? Now we’re all happy to announce our seven-days-a-week therapy sessions and our heaping handfuls of daily medications just to live and survive in this shit-ass world. You don’t have to live in the suburbs to have a nervous meltdown, but I’m sure it helps!

White picket fences! *BANG BANG* Neighbors borrowing your lawnmower! *BANG BANG BANG*

Closet homosexuality. Yeah, that one rings true. The last thing you wanted to be in 1999 was gay, but the movie forces you to consider Col. Fitts’ character and… empathize? I hope not. I didn’t find much beauty in his self-loathing homophobic dickhead character at all, but I liked how Ricky fed him what he wanted during every conversation they had together until the very end. The colonel was like “put up your dukes” and Ricky was like “yeah I like penises, what of it sir?” Too bad CJ Cregg was a total zombie in their family, I would have lit her husband up like he was Josh Lyman.

TOPIC 2 — Synthesis, Structure, and Properties of Chiral Titanium and Zirconium Complexes Bearing Biaryl Strapped Substituted Cyclopentadienyl Ligands

Just kidding! That’s Bill Odenkirk’s dissertation! I don’t know shit about cyclopentadienyl ligands! As if!

But yeah, I’ve said enough about American Beauty. Leave me alone.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

When Lester throws the asparagus, he was supposed to throw it on the floor. The reactions of Annette Bening and Thora Birch are genuine.
Throwing it at Thora Birch’s watermelon-shaped head would’ve garnered an extra-genuine reaction! It doesn’t get any more genuine than a trip to the emergency room, I always say.

According to his Oscar speech, screenwriter Alan Ball was sitting at the World Trade Center plaza when he saw a paper bag floating in the wind and was inspired by it to write the film, which was originally conceived as a stage play.
As of this writing, this bit of trivia has 911 thumbs up on IMDb! COINCIDENCE?! I think not! Alan Ball caused 9/11.

Infamously, the most beautiful thing in the world. So beautiful I want to put it over my head and tie it around my neck.

Since Thora Birch was barely 17 years old at the time she made the film and thus classified as a minor in the United States, her parents had to approve her brief topless scene in the movie, and they and child labor representatives were on the set for the shooting of it. “To me, [the nudity] made sense,” Birch said of the scene. “It wasn’t something that shouldn’t be in there. It’s something that would happen.”
Yeah, this made me uncomfortable since I knew Birch was a minor. This seems like such a dated thing to happen. I feel like there’s not a studio in the country that would allow a minor to go topless in a feature film. BUT THAT’S JUST ME. I FORGOT TO BE FUNNY IN THIS ONE. OH WELL.

The title of the film refers to a breed of roses that, while pretty and appealing in appearance, is often prone to rot underneath at the roots and branches of the plant. Thus, the tagline “… look closer” tells the viewer that when they look beyond the “perfect suburban life”, they will find something rancid at the root.
Double meanings, fuck yeah. They should have called the movie “Stench Blossoms”.

The helicopter shot at the beginning of the movie was originally for a flying sequence where Lester floats over the houses and then down onto his bed.
Put that in the film and kiss your Oscar goodbye.

The scene where Lester is putting in an application for the counter job at Smiley Burger was actually shot at night, but it was later fixed to look like the daytime. Notice that neither Lester nor the burger kid have shadows on their faces from the sun.
WOW. I DID NOT NOTICE THAT THE BURGER KID HAD NO SHADOW ON HIS FACE. This is the worst trivia since “Vic Morrow got decapitated like a nerd” from that one Twilighty movie about that Zone.

The Spartanettes’ dance routine was choreographed by singer Paula Abdul.
Ah, so that’s why it looked like the kids were all stumbling around drunk as shit.

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Yes. American Beauty is quite thought-provoking and, although often over-the-top, it’s relatively grounded in reality. As someone who escaped the suburbs, I could’ve someday ended up like Lester if I stayed. Hopefully without the light pedophilia, though. Who am I? Matt Gaetz??