Thursday, May 10, 2012

Critically Loved Movies (That I Hate): American Beauty


File:American Beauty poster.jpg

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. 


I don’t know if the much ballyhooed lead performances by Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning are terrible because of the screenplay, director, of the actors themselves. I’ll split the difference and blame all three equally. Benning’s character is a complete cartoon; no one who acts like her has or will ever exist. Popeye is more nuanced. I wouldn’t mind this if the movie didn’t think it was the most important statement on the American Dream since 1776 (Brad Pitt’s character in Inglorious Basterds is cartoonish as well, but he fits the tone of that movie). Her performance is so goofy and hysterical that it borders on sexist. But perhaps “misanthropic” is a better adjective for this movie, since any film that expects us to sympathize with Kevin Spacey’s character must have a profoundly low opinion of the human race. Spacey’s character is supposed to be undergoing an existential crisis, but instead acts as a pouting man-child throughout, up to the point of daydreaming about (fairly chaste) pederasty. The climax is brought forth through a confluence of truly ridiculous circumstances, primarily a misinterpreted, silhouetted oral sex scene, which was basically shot for shot recreated in Austin Powers 2 and 3. When the climax for your drama can be wholesale replicated by a comedy, perhaps you should have performed some rewrites. The only relatable aspect of the film is that it, as it nears its conclusion, there are two characters who want to murder Kevin Spacey’s character, finally validating my feelings from the previous two hours. Ultimately, American Beauty is like a drunken sorority girl, demanding everyone pay attention to them but having nothing important or original to say. In other words, it’s the Sarah Palin of Oscar winners.  

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