When American Beauty won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2000, it seemed to capture something essential about the end of the 20th century: the suspicion that the comfortable American life was not necessarily a happy one. Directed by Sam Mendes from Alan Ball’s screenplay, the film turns a seemingly ordinary suburban family into a darkly comic examination of dissatisfaction, desire, conformity, and the desperate search for meaning. The movie won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography.
Buy American BeautyAt the center is Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), an advertising executive who has become emotionally deadened by his job, his marriage, and his relationship with his teenage daughter, Jane (Thora Birch). Lester’s decision to rebel against his carefully arranged existence begins when he becomes infatuated with Jane’s friend Angela (Mena Suvari). His attraction is disturbing, and the film does not entirely escape the difficulty of making it the catalyst for a middle-aged man’s awakening. Yet Angela ultimately represents something larger than sexual desire: Lester’s longing for youth, possibility, and the feeling that his life still belongs to him.
The film’s satire works best when it exposes the gap between appearances and reality. Lester’s wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is obsessed with professional success and maintaining an immaculate suburban image, while their daughter is convinced that her parents have no idea who she really is. Across the street, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) secretly films the world around him, finding beauty in things everyone else ignores. His domineering father, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), has constructed an even more rigid version of the masculine ideal that Lester is trying to escape.
Mendes gives the material an appropriately polished surface. The perfect lawns, elegant houses, carefully arranged dinners, and famous image of a young woman surrounded by red roses all suggest a world of extraordinary beauty that is nevertheless spiritually rotten. Conrad Hall’s Oscar-winning cinematography is particularly effective in turning ordinary suburban spaces into something both seductive and ominous.
The performances are uniformly strong, with Spacey providing the film’s comic and dramatic center. Lester can be selfish, ridiculous, and occasionally repellent, but Spacey makes his awakening believable. Bening is equally good at revealing the desperation beneath Carolyn’s brittle determination, while Birch and Bentley give the younger characters a vulnerability that prevents the movie from becoming merely a collection of adult caricatures.
The film’s best qualities remain difficult to dismiss. American Beauty is funny, visually striking, unsettling, and unexpectedly compassionate. Beneath its satire is a simple idea: a life can look beautiful from the outside while being unbearably empty within. The film may no longer seem quite as revolutionary as it did when it won Best Picture, but its questions about happiness, identity, and the cost of pretending remain worth asking.
