American Beauty (1999)

Starring Sam Mendes. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper, Mena Suvari, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scott Bakula, Sam Robards. [R]

A hollow movie about the hollowness of American suburbia, taking the “…look closer” tagline angle to such pretentious levels that it becomes queasy on a few occasions (“sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in,” anyone?). Malaise has crept into the lives of middle-aged exec Spacey, his neurotic and unhappy wife (Bening), their cynical daughter (Birch), the teenage weirdo obsessive next door (Bentley), and so on, which results in the expected furball of mid-life crisis, infidelity, drug use, depravity, deception, lust, and videotaping of a plastic bag blowin’ in the wind (too bad the answer, my friend, can’t be found in that same wind). Aided and abetted by the unearned confidence of debuting director Mendes’ arty symbiosis of ironic detachment and soul-burnt feeling, its familiar themes are covered in a satirical fashion that obscures and cross-directs its own message. Although Alan Ball’s much-lauded script can be insufferable at times (and awfully bland and obvious for something striving so hard for profundity), it’s still peppered with tart humor and juicy snatches of dialogue that at least make the film’s underlying failures tolerable—even palatable—most of the way. And even after emerging on the other side with a sense of frustration and emptiness, it’s still possible to savor the richly precise performances from Spacey, Bening, and Cooper. Proved popular enough with critics and audiences at the time to score five Academy Award wins for Mendes, Spacey, Ball, and photographer Conrad L. Hall, not to mention Best Picture.

52/100