American Beauty (American Beauty (DVD))

Member Name: Lichfield1979

Product:	American Beauty (DVD)
Date:	12/09/08 (220 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great cast and script and deserved its Oscars.

Disadvantages: A lot of films from this era really seemed to be grappling with the same subjects.

American Beauty (1999) 122 minutes

Directed by Sam Mendes, Written by Alan Ball, Cinematography by Conrad Hall, Music by Thomas Newman.

Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper.

Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Cinematography. Nominated: Best Actress, Best Original Score, Best Editing.


American Beauty is a murder mystery but there are no cops or lawyers. It is told before all that from the point of view of the main character as he is dying. American Beauty is also a suburban satire, one that draws you in sufficiently to forget it begins with a video diary of a daughter and her creepy boyfriend talking about murder, followed by a voiceover from her father, saying although he doesn't know it yet, he has only one year to live. The camera pans over an aerial shot shown floating above an idyllic American neighbourhood.

Lester Burnham foretelling his death reminds me of Carlito's Way, but there aren't any gangsters. His midlife crisis reminds me of Fight Club, but there aren't any existentialist dilemmas. His neighbourhood reminds me of Blue Velvet, but there's nothing to be terrified by. His death reminds me of Six Feet Under, but there aren't any undertakers. The title reminds me of The Grateful Dead, still playing in the summer, a long time ago. Thematically, it reminds me of nearly every major American movie made in the late nineties, in one way or another, but there were a lot of very good ones around this time, and this is one of the best. A pet subject of mine for another review, perhaps. The characters remind me of a Richard Ford novel.

Like I say, there aren't any cops and lawyers, but if I was a police detective, which I'm not, I'd probably want to impound that videotape as evidence, if I could find it. This is a beautiful suburban neighbourhood with nice cars and spacious tree-lined avenues. There's a bright-red 1970 Pontiac Firebird parked in the driveway at the murder-scene, and torrential rain is lashing down in the night. Through the bright red front door they've found a dead male in his forties, a regular husband and father, shot in the back of the head, with blood spattered on the white kitchen tiles like rose petals.

Daughter and her boyfriend are nowhere to be found. Her best friend is at the house though, a blonde cheerleader type, who looks very pretty, but also quite young and natural and ordinary, for a cheerleader in a Hollywood movie. Which this absolutely isn't, goddamn it! This is a murder investigation! This is real life! Look! Can't you see?! The blonde is trying to put on a tough exterior but she's crumbling inside. She may be the one who phoned the police, poor kid. She says her best friend has run away to New York this very night with the boy next door, a drug dealer with lots of money. We'll want to find them later then.

Also in the house is the main character's, sorry, the victim's wife. She's a crazy hysterical bitch with OCD, the original Bree Van de Kamp. And she's absolutely sobbing her eyes out and soaking wet and talking to herself. "Shut up! Shut up!" and now she's slapping herself in the face. See, I told you she was crazy. She looks like somebody really rained on her parade. Oh and she's got a gun that looks like it's recently been fired. I don't know how I know that, but I do, because I'm a police detective, goddamn it. And I'm going to solve this here crime right now. Book her, Danno. Murder one.

Danno's not too sure, but what would he know. He's not a detective, like me, holding the mirror up to society, until it cracks. It's going to take proper police work to get to the bottom of this, and I'm your man. Where would America be, without detectives? Danno seems to think we should look into these people and their lives, and this neighbourhood, in fact, a little more deeply than we have been doing, but I say what we see on the surface is what killed this man. Danno says he found pot in the garage and the drug dealer and the victim may have been smoking together. He wants to go look next door. What would he know? Let's humour him anyway.

Next door live a catatonic housewife and an upstanding ex-marine. Where would America be without marines? Everything is impeccably tidy and very quiet. The catatonic housewife clearly doesn't know anything. The marine is washing a bloody-red stained white t-shirt. Hmm. That looks kind of like the red spatter of bright bloody rose-petals on the white kitchen tiles. Hmm. Nah. Doesn't mean a thing. Danno says the gun cabinet is unlocked and the guy collects Nazi memorabilia, but there's just, like, one piece, and the marine says he beat the crap out of his son because he said he was having a gay love affair with the victim. That must be how he got the blood on his t-shirt. Everything seems to be perfectly normal here.

The marine says his son made a videotape of the victim lifting weights in his garage, naked. That's weird. This no-good son should really show the proper respect to his military hero dad instead of smoking drugs and being a homosexual. We need to get back to good old conservative values, don't you know. That's what this is all about. Except Danno doesn't believe the son and the victim were sleeping together. Danno thinks if the victim was having under-age sex with anybody, it was the cheerleader. She's the kind of precocious kid older men stare at lustily. Maybe we should speak to her parents about what she's doing here. What nonsense. The marine knows what he saw. Danno says the son has lots of video equipment and we should check it all out really closely to make sure we understand what we're looking at. I'll let him do that because I can't be bothered right now. And besides, the kid's got vials of urine in his fridge. Yuck. Danno must be good for something. I'm going to arrest the wife.

First lets talk to the cheerleader, because she's hot. Where would America be without cheerleaders? She says she tried to seduce the victim, but it was her fault, and he was really nice to her when she told him she was a still a virgin, so they just talked, and listened to a cover-version of Don't Let It Bring You Down, by Neil Young, sung by Annie Lennox, and he wanted to know how his daughter was feeling, because they had grown apart. Danno thinks this is an honest story, but I say these suburbanites are goddamn creepy. Where would America be without creepy suburbanites?

Now the wife is saying her husband quit his job as an advertising writer and blackmailed his boss for a lot of money and used it to buy a vintage sports car. Then he went to work at a fast-food drive-through, because that's what he did the summer they first met after high-school, and they were happy then, and he just partied and got laid and she faked seizures at frat parties and flashed helicopters on rooftops. And they were happy then. But now she's an uptight real estate agent who can't sell a house and this afternoon her husband busted her for having an affair with another realtor, so she went to the shooting-range to let off steam and has been going demented listening to self-help tapes. Where would America be without estate agents? This all goes towards establishing motive and opportunity in my professional opinion.

Danno says if this was a movie, which it isn't goddamn it, because this is a murder investigation, and a closed one at that, but if this were a movie, then it wouldn't be a David Lynch film about creepy surreal suburbanites, but more like an adaptation of The Sportswriter or Independence Day, with real, complicated characters, but one in which they just happened to have wandered into a crime story because of their flaws and because of circumstance and because you kind of need a plot like that if you're going to win any Oscars whilst dropping anvils about important social issues and satirising nostalgia and contemporary American living. Danno talks, a lot, and doesn't much pause for breath. He says Kevin Spacey, sorry, Lester Burnham, dying, is like a metaphor for the death of his childhood, but it releases him to see life with a larger perspective of what really matters, and he wants to share that epiphany with the audience, sorry, the, erm, detectives, so they won't be afraid to follow him to the other side, because sometimes we have to let go of our illusions of how the world is, and that the occasion for this was his worry that his daughter hadn't got much to look forward to as she passes from being a teenager into adult American life, but he understands now that he was wrong, but he was a good parent for caring, who just needed to show that in a more responsible way, because he went through the same transition a long time ago, but he forgets that sometimes, and now he's relived it from the perspective of a father, he's free of all the complexes and misguided values that are stultifying good people in the rat-race around him, and everybody understands this in the end. So I ask Danno, because he seems like he would know, was Lester Burnham really doing that cheerleader?

Danno has been watching the videos while I talked to the cheerleader and the wife. He says he found one that was just this empty, wrinkled, white plastic bag fluttering in the autumn leaves in a vacant parking lot, circling in the wind, sometimes whipping violently without warning and soaring skyward, then floating down, gracefully, like a balloon. He says: "it was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew 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. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in." This drug dealer sounds like a total psycho if you ask me. Who films stuff like that? Who talks like that? Maybe he did it, after all.

Him and the daughter turn up and say they didn't flee the scene after all. He says the victim looked serene when they found the body. "When you see something like that, it's like God is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you're careful, you can look right back. And what do you see? Beauty." I think the kid's a screw-up but Danno seems to think this makes sense. Actually, Danno isn't really a police officer at all, he is the drug dealer, the marine's son, and he's been here the whole time. Damn. I really should have noticed that. Now my review, erm, police report, is like Fight Club too, bet you didn't see that coming, did you. Where would America be without drug dealers? I guess people aren't always who you think they look like on the surface. I've always said that you know. I said so at the start. Go back and check if you don't believe me. I'm a detective. And a good one. The kid looks beat up pretty bad and says his father is a dangerous man. Perhaps we should speak to him again. He might have a secret. I don't know. I still think the wife did it. Or the blackmailed boss, remember him? Or the real-estate agent. Or the daughter. Or the drug-dealer. Or the cheerleader. Or the marine. Or the audience. Maybe we ALL killed Lester Burnham. Now there's an idea. I'm going to put that in my police report.

If only the victim could talk to us for himself, to give us, like, a voiceover of his last year of life, the one he spent reliving his lost youth, and what he learnt from it, at the end, as he was dying. If only he could tell us what really happened, on that last day, in this quiet suburban house, full of American beauty. He'd probably say: "I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die... First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time...I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... You will someday."

But, that can only happen in movies...

Summary: American Beauty