American
Beauty
(1999) is the winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best
Director (Sam Mendes), Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Original Screenplay, and
Best Cinematography. Additionally, it was nominated for Best Actress (Annette
Benning), Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. It boasts an 88% Fresh
rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Can a movie be narcissistic? I don’t mean the director,
screenwriter, or actors; I’m talking about the movie itself. If the answer is
yes, then surely American Beauty is
the most self-obsessed movie in existence. Every single element is deeply in
love with itself. Sam Mendes, not a bad director by any means (I’m the biggest apologist
of Road to Perdition in North
America), frames each shot as if he’s making the most important film in cinema
history. While the direction is certainly overwrought, it’s near the bottom of
the shit list in terms of American
Beauty’s crimes. More problematic is Alan Ball’s screenplay, which flaunts
itself as the cleverest American satire since Mark Twain put pen to paper, but
is in fact full of grindingly obvious clichés. The problems begin with the
premise. The ennui of the upper middle class is a topic that has been flogged
far past the point of redundancy; it’s not beating a dead horse, it’s beating
the bones of that horse’s distant descendants (Absurdly, Sam Mendes revisited
this theme in Revolutionary Road,
another film that spends its runtime groveling for an Oscar). Every aspect of
the plot unfolds with equal parts pretentiousness and dullness. This is a movie
that has a character unironically pontificating about a plastic bag floating in
the wind. This is a movie where a middle-aged man’s sexual fantasies about a
teenage girl begin and end with her covered in falling rose petals. This is a
movie where a virulently homophobic Marine is revealed to be – gasp! – a
self-loathing gay man himself.
