American Beauty
Sam Mendes (1999)
In Spacey Unmasked, a two-part documentary which aired on Channel 4 earlier this month, a succession of men alleged they had been on the receiving end of inappropriate and traumatising sexual behaviour inflicted by Kevin Spacey. Although the material had been gathered in the build-up to Spacey’s 2023 criminal trial in London, only one of the men in the documentary (according to its opening titles) also gave evidence at that trial, which resulted in a not guilty verdict on all charges. Katherine Haywood, who directed Spacey Unmasked, sees her film as timely: she ‘hopes we are at the tipping point of a male #MeToo movement, which doesn’t diminish what women go through, but adds another important conversation’ (Metro). This comes as a bit of a surprise if you assumed that ‘conversation’ had been going on since late 2017, when the first public allegations against Spacey were made. The raison d’être of Haywood’s film is probably more accurately hinted at in words used by more than one of her interviewees: ‘maybe what he did wasn’t illegal but…’ And you could almost hear other anxious voices underlying the documentary’s actual soundtrack – the voices of TV execs telling each other, ‘We went to all the trouble of getting this stuff together in expectation of a guilty verdict last year – surely we’re not going to waste it? It shows Spacey in a bad light so let’s trash him anyway’. That’s a dubious line to take about someone who so far has been cleared by courts on both sides of the Atlantic and whose professional career has already been wrecked. Katherine Haywood’s rise-and-fall story included a few clips from some of Kevin Spacey’s films. Whatever the point of Spacey Unmasked may have been, its effect was to make at least this viewer want to watch American Beauty again.
For the first few years of this century, doing that was a more or less annual event in our house. Much as she, too, liked the film, Sally reasonably began to feel these frequent viewings were too frequent; I’m not sure exactly when the ritual stopped but it must have been before 2008, when I got into the anal habit of writing about every film I saw, including ones I had seen before. The longer I’ve kept that habit going, the more the absence of some thoughts on American Beauty has felt like an omission. Thanks to Channel 4, I’ll now rectify the omission.
Nearly everything about Sam Mendes’s film-making debut is right, from the title onwards. ‘American’ in a picture’s name is often there to inflate its meaning – claiming to show something essential to the culture in which its story is set. This was true of George Lucas’s American Graffiti in 1973; it was still true, half a century later, of Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. Mendes’s film, written by Alan Ball, doesn’t entirely buck the trend but the title’s meaning is richer than that of most of its fellow Americans. For a start, American Beauty is an actual thing – ‘a deep pink to crimson rose cultivar, bred by Henri Lédéchaux in France in 1875’ (Wikipedia). At the start of the film, as the voiceover narration of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) introduces himself and other important people in his life, his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is in the garden of their suburban home, tending her roses, including one of the titular variety. As the story proceeds, the manifestations of beauty are various and variously subversive. There’s Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), the jeune fille en fleur with whom jaded Lester becomes sexually obsessed from the moment he sees her in a group of cheerleaders whose routine is the interval entertainment at a high-school basketball game. Angela is sixteen and Lester is forty-two: not only is he old enough to be her father – he is the father of Jane (Thora Birch), Angela’s exact contemporary, fellow cheerleader and friend. Then there’s the plastic bag, filmed by Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), the son of the Burnhams’ new neighbours, whose inquisitive zoom lens leads Angela to call him ‘that psycho next door’. As we watch the bag rising and falling in the wind, Ricky explains to Jane what he saw in it:
‘This bag was just… dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever. … Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is going to cave in.’
Whereas Ricky perceives the bag as almost humanly alive, a homeless old woman whom he also filmed had frozen to death (we don’t see the footage of this video). When Jane, whose sexual partner Ricky becomes, questions why he filmed the woman, he says, ‘Because it was amazing …it’s like God is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you’re careful, you can look right back’. Jane asks, ‘And what do you see?’ Ricky replies, ‘Beauty’.
That early sequence with the roses also helps establish the film’s signature colour. The Burnhams’ front door is painted red. The flowers in the garden and in a vase on their living-room table are red. Ditto the car of Lester’s dreams – ‘a red Pontiac Firebird’: he buys himself one when he quits his soul-destroying advertising job and virtually blackmails his boss into stumping up a handsome severance package. In her opening scene, Carolyn, after a moment’s approval of her American Beauty rose, promptly snips off the scarlet bloom but it generates new flowers in her husband’s floral sexual fantasies. Watching Angela in the cheerleading, he sees her unzip her top and release red rose petals from within. He dreams of her wearing nothing but a profusion of the same; a few petals float down onto his face as Lester, with a silly, beatific smile on his face, lies in his single bed, beside Carolyn in hers. A little later, he imagines Angela in a bath, its surface covered by floating red rose petals. And the film culminates in bloodshed.
We know from the start that Lester won’t get out of American Beauty alive. His opening voiceover tells us so: ‘In less than a year, I’ll be dead – of course, I don’t know that yet’. The deceased narrator device has been used in novels and films in different ways. The title character in William Golding’s Pincher Martin is apparently the sole survivor of a shipwreck; the narrative comprises description of his struggle to stay alive; the twist in the novel’s tail is that Martin drowned shortly after his ship was sunk. In Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (adapted for the screen in 2009), Susie Salmon, from a rather creepy heavenly vantage point, reviews her murder and observes its aftermath in the lives of her nearest and dearest. Lester Burnham’s narration is rather more akin to that of Joe Gillis in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) – at least in establishing the distinctive, amusingly confounding tone of the tale he tells. The dead-man-talking conceit, part of the cleverness of Alan Ball’s screenplay for American Beauty, is also part of its mystery.
The combination of smart and surprising is pervasive. There’s no shortage of caricatures (although protagonist Lester isn’t among them), which allowed its detractors to dismiss American Beauty as a facile satire of white American suburban aspiration and desperation. Yet the sustained wit of Ball’s dialogue and the skill needed to do it justice, stimulate the cast to aim higher and go further in their characterisations (in effect, to validate the picture’s tagline, which bids us ‘Look closer’). The outstanding example is Annette Bening. Carolyn Burnham is in every sense seriously materialistic. She’s an estate agent – a sole agent to the extent that, preparing to try to sell a decidedly unappealing property, she cleans the place herself. Carolyn’s self-motivating mantra (‘I will sell this house today’) doesn’t work; she weeps at her failure then slaps her own face repeatedly as a punishment (‘Weak – baby. Shut up. Shut up! Shut up!’). She’s in thrall to and, in due course, gets in bed with rival realtor Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher), the self-styled local ‘King of Real Estate’. When Lester briefly tries to reignite the Burnhams’ long-lost marital ardour and they lie on the sofa together, things are going well until Carolyn is distracted by the bottle of beer in her husband’s outstretched hand and warns he’s going to spill it. Lester responds to this passion-killing remark with ‘So what? It’s just a couch’; Carolyn reminds him, ‘This is a four thousand dollar sofa upholstered in Italian silk. This is not “just a couch”’. In these moments, by showing Carolyn’s real distress, Bening makes her more ridiculous but not merely ridiculous: you feel her pain. Through her physical qualities – her beauty, her command of movement and of gesture – the actress conveys something that, to British eyes at least (evidently including Sam Mendes’s), seems typically American: the vulnerability of perfectly-groomed WASP womanhood, the brittleness of bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed poise.
In the supporting cast, Chris Cooper also gets deep into, and transmutes, an apparently clichéd conception. Frank Fitts is a retired Marine colonel and martinet father, liable, when Ricky crosses him, to beat his son. Frank’s prize possessions include, as well as firearms, a piece of the Third Reich’s official state china, complete with Nazi swastika. In Cooper’s hands, Colonel Fitts is a grimly comical villain who becomes a tragic one. Vociferously homophobic, he’s eventually revealed to be a repressed homosexual and the shame drives him to murder. How much Frank’s hang-ups explain the distracted, vaguely distressed, manner of his wife, Barbara, is open to interpretation: her role is small in terms of numbers of lines and scenes but Allison Janney gives it remarkable depth. Even vain, flirty Angela, who wants to be a fashion model, proves more vulnerable than expected. When Ricky punctures her smartass pretension with what is, for Angela, the ultimate insult – ‘You’re totally ordinary, and you know it’ – Mendes doesn’t put the camera on her face. Instead, a rear view shot shows us she has been cut down to size. With her confused feelings and conflicted loyalties, Jane offers Thora Birch the chance to shape a relatively complex character; Birch takes it impressively. Wes Bentley, with his good looks and air of strangeness, delivers just what the film-makers are after: Ricky Fitts emerges as the weird spiritual hero of the piece. The veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall does a stunning job of lighting the eyes of Bentley and Thora Birch in the near-darkness of Jane’s bedroom.
Until Kevin Spacey’s career suddenly disintegrated, the four senior actors in the cast had enjoyed sustained success in the years to come. American Beauty is such a feat of collaboration that it’s hardly damning with faint praise to say that few others involved in it, whether in front of or behind the camera, have gone on to better things in cinema. It is more surprising in some cases than in others, though. Eight features on, Sam Mendes still hasn’t replicated the film-making fluency and imagination he shows here. This was the penultimate movie shot by Conrad Hall, who died in early 2003 (his swansong was Mendes’s second feature, Road to Perdition (2002)). Thomas Newman has written plenty of decent movie music since (not least for Mendes pictures) although nothing to match the American Beauty score, comically wonky yet rhythmical for the most part, on occasion deeply wistful. Thora Birch was excellent in a lead role in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001); otherwise, the modest achievements of the three younger actors make their American Beauty contributions, at this distance in time, seem testament to exceptionally acute casting. The truly puzzling under-achiever is scenarist Alan Ball, a successful writer and director of TV series (Six Feet Under, True Blood) but the author of only two cinema screenplays since American Beauty (for Towelhead (2007) and Uncle Frank (2020), neither of which made much impact).
Ball’s screenplay has, as well as brilliantly witty lines, integrity. Lester’s new lease of life – his escape from advertising, his domestic rebellion, his physical fitness regime – is the consequence of his lust for a minor. He eventually stops short of having sex with Angela, when on the verge of it, only because she anxiously admits this is her first time, not because he thinks better of the whole idea. There are a few wobbles in the closing minutes. As he’s about to die, Lester brings to mind a montage of outstanding images in his life but these recollections don’t feel as if they fully belong to him. Carolyn returns home with murder in mind – Mendes overstresses this – only to discover that she’s too late: Lester is already slumped over a table with a bullet through his brain. Carolyn opens a cupboard containing her husband’s clothes, fingers one or two garments, and collapses in grief. It hardly ever looks convincing when an actor slides to the ground in anguish; even Annette Bening can’t make this instance of it any different. But the closing voiceover – in which Lester virtually reprises Ricky’s earlier speech about beauty, Kevin Spacey modulating his dry delivery wonderfully – brings the film home in style.
American Beauty won five Academy Awards – for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay and Cinematography – and deserved at least two more (for Annette Bening and Thomas Newman, both nominated and both still Oscarless, twenty-five years on). In a featurette on our DVD of the film, its producers, Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, discuss their enthusiasm for Alan Ball’s script, their doubts as to whether any studio would come on board with it, their hopes that DreamWorks might (Steven Spielberg is another of the featurette’s talking heads). The script would certainly not be produced in Hollywood now. American Beauty fell out of fashion and favour well before Spacey’s fall from grace; and what drives the plot is thoroughly unacceptable to 2020s liberal sensibilities. This hints at something larger, and regrettable, about current film culture – a dearth of characters whose complexity makes them challenging to the audience. Lester Burnham isn’t the only person in the film behaving in ways that, if your friend or neighbour were doing the same, would make you even more uncomfortable than the man on screen does. Along with his flashes of mystical intuition, Ricky Fitts is a voyeur of sorts and peddles drugs. But their vices, are not, for Sam Mendes and Alan Ball, enough for Lester and Ricky to be written off, let alone ‘cancelled’. The film shows what’s driving them – and what’s driving Carolyn, Frank, Jane and Angela, too. We’re shown their appealing and their unappealing qualities; we don’t need to approve of them to be absorbed by them, and to enjoy their company.
American Beauty now seems a classic comedy-drama in part because it transcends its time: there was hardly an embarrassment of Hollywood riches in the approach to millennium year (although 1999 was anomalously strong). The film was made long after Pauline Kael had stopped writing about cinema but it is mentioned in Francis Davis’s Afterglow, published in 2002 (the year after her death) and subtitled ‘A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael’. Kael tells Davis of her regret that ‘we don’t go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like American Beauty’. She goes on, ‘It’s hard to believe that people who, in the sixties and early seventies, seemed to be opening their minds a little bit would close them down again in the name of political correctness’. Some of these words strike me as less nostalgic than weary: despite its dark aspects, Sam Mendes’s film is one of the most thoroughly entertaining that I know. Yet Pauline Kael’s judgment is remarkable in retrospect. How far the culture has travelled in the last quarter-century for American Beauty to be cited as evidence of the pernicious effects of political correctness!
I’ll end where I began. I’ve now been watching films regularly for well over fifty years. Kevin Spacey’s performance in this one is among the most continuously exhilarating that I’ve experienced. Watch as Lester, sharing a joint with Ricky Fitts outside the site of the annual estate agents’ gathering that Carolyn has dragged her husband along to, fails to control his laughter when she appears in the doorway to demand to know what he’s doing. Watch Lester, at the peak of a family argument at the dinner table, rise from his chair and masterfully seize the bowl of asparagus he has twice, vainly, requested. Listen to him, again at the realtors’ get-together, reassure Buddy Kane, who doesn’t recognise Lester from their meeting at the same event the previous year, ‘It’s okay – I wouldn’t remember me either’. (Later on, when he has taken a part-time job at a drive-thru fast-food joint, Lester serves a couple canoodling in their car. Carolyn is so flustered that she introduces Lester yet again: ‘Buddy, this is my-‘; ‘her husband,’ Lester calmly interrupts, ‘we’ve met before, but something tells me you’re going to remember me this time’.) Beneath the hilarious, nuanced sarcasm of Spacey’s line readings, you keep catching poignant hints of Lester’s cafard and regret. I remember thinking, when I first saw American Beauty, that any actor giving a performance as great as this could die happy even if he never had another good role. As things stand now, the actor in question may never get another good role. Perhaps he won’t die happy either. But Kevin Spacey is magnificent and memorable in this picture. Unless cancel culture advances to confiscation of DVDs, he always will be.
17 May 2024