In defense of American Beauty

Here is something I know to be true: I love American Beauty. It’s a small thing to say, but somehow, it feels huge. Because Sam Mendes’ 1999 success has had a rough go of things as of late. To profess love, in 2019, could be considered a controversial statement. It is, at the very least, an extremely uncool one. My street credit as a respectable cinephile is surely ruined. My market value is tanking. 

How did we get here?

American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes (Skyfall), and written by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), was released in 1999. It starred Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, and Mena Suvari. It was a general success all around, making $365 million worldwide and receiving a generous outpouring of praise. It went on to win five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. It arrived at the very tail end of the 90’s, and was immediately cemented as a touchstone of the decade in cinema. It was the perfect summation of an era, which led to its unraveling.

—

Ricky and Jane are sitting in front of a television set in Ricky’s bedroom. A home video is playing of a plastic bag blowing in the wind. It moves in circles, goes up and down and around, as if dancing. There are leaves, too, blowing in tandem. Ricky took this video, and it holds significance for him:

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. Right? And this bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. That’s the day I realized that 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… I need to remember… 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.

It is a beautiful moment for a beautiful movie. I get a little tight in the chest each time I watch it. I think about Ricky, and the way it feels to be young like that, hopeful like that, and in love, and alive; to live like an open wound. I relate to Ricky, finding meaning in the meaningless. And I relate to Jane, who finds the charm in his grandiose and his naïveté. They position themselves against the world, but they cannot stop themselves from rooting for it.

—

I am young when I first see American Beauty. How young, I do not remember, only that my stomach was full of youth and doubt and a burning desire to find my place. I am Jane and Ricky, sitting in front of that TV. 

There are so many movies of our lives; the ones we love, the ones we don’t, and the ones we cannot seem to get rid of. American Beauty has been all three. When I am young, I love it. When I grow older, I do not. 

It is somewhere in the middle of college, when I start to really fall into the grips of cinema, that this happens. I am sitting on a friend’s couch, desperate to impress. He is my gateway; he loves Cronenberg and metal, and we have just finished watching Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which I didn’t like but say that I did. He asks me what my favorite movies are. I mention American Beauty and he laughs, more a cough than a true, belly laugh, a small sound that feels huge. He lists the likes of Persona, Videodrome, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I don’t watch American Beauty for another two years.

—

I don’t know what is considered the true killing blow of American Beauty. It could be the scene with Ricky and Jane and the TV, which is oft mocked and parodied (and then there’s that Katy Perry song). Broad City did a wonderful bit in an episode that makes me consistently laugh, and there are numerous other examples. It is the 90’s movie to mock for being made in the 90’s.

And then there is Kevin Spacey. I am always the last to speak on That Question: the art and the artist and their responsibility to one another. I hold my tongue and wait my turn because I do not know what to say. I am bad at this part of loving film. I love so many movies made by bad people. I love so many performances given by bad people. I worship an art form that is populated by a world of greed, misdeed, and outright criminality.

Roman Polanski is one of my favorite filmmakers. I don’t know what that says about me.

Kevin Spacey is a bad person. He should not have been given this role, let alone any other role, in the time since his sexual assaults became an “open secret”. But he was cast, and this performance exists, and so we’re left to wrestle with how we go about consuming it. I, for one, consume it with a twinge of guilt, but nonetheless take it in greedily. I adore this performance. It is one of my very favorites, something I hold up with Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas and Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher. It is vulnerable and funny and brash and disgusting and empathetic. I want to hold it close, and get as far away from it as possible.

—

Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a sad-sack of a husband who slumps under the weight of everyone’s disappointment. When we meet Lester, he is rushing out to the car while his wife, Carol (Benning), lays on the horn, as if announcing her distaste to anyone who’s listening. He trips, and his briefcase spills open. Carolyn looks unsurprised. Lester smirks, and holds up his hands, the universal combination of a man who has given up. Jane (Birch), their unwilling daughter, appears to wither and die.

And so is American Beauty, a brutal, funny satire of the American dream and all its cruelty. It is a movie about people who slave to their image, whether it be in reverence or rejection. It is a white house with a red door, and a picket fence, and a minivan. It is a dozen rose pedals descending from the body of a girl. It is many, many things. 

Pretentious is one of them, and it is by design. It is worn differently by each character, but it is there, woven into the fabric of the world that they craft for themselves. Carolyn is pretentious because of her aspiration, or rather her desire to be seen as aspirational. She worships an image that does not exist — a successful realtor, a successful wife — and is broken by its absence. Lester is pretentious because he deems himself interesting, more aware than everyone around him, the bearer of truth. Everyone is a fraud except for him, his authenticity defined, in his mind, by his ability to see this veneer and call it out. Jane and Ricky are pretentious in the way all teenagers are, with their woes and their ideas and their need to express them. They see the world and they refuse it, and so they are greater.

And then there is Angela. Angela Chase: the center, the crux, the crucible. What do we do about her?

—

Played with tempestuous vulnerability by Mena Suvari, Angela is the axis on which American Beauty spins. She is Jane’s best friend, though there is a thinly veiled competitiveness between the two of them that creates a rot in their relationship. And she is the catalyst for Lester’s mid-life meltdown, her youth and interest in him like water in the desert. American Beauty hinges on her relationship to other people, but it succeeds because of its commitment to her relationship to herself. 

Angela is presented as the antithesis of Jane. She is conventionally beautiful and proud of it, wielding her looks like a weapon at anyone who dare challenge her. And she is painfully, obviously insecure, revealed in part by her apparent inability to tell the whole truth. Her self-proclaimed confidence is a falsehood, too, just like Jane’s apathy, and there they find common ground: if you do not care, you cannot be hurt.

In Lester, Angela finally finds the truth in all the lies she spins. An older man, an inappropriate man, interested in her. He is not a flashy choice but his age is all she needs to craft her fantasy. With Lester’s attention comes confirmation of her specialness. She uses him to rise above the rest.

It is possible to recognize Angela’s agency in their flirtation without romanticizing it. Just because Angela returns the interest does not excuse nor justify Lester’s pursuit. It is a gross, inappropriate thing, and it is supposed to be. In Roger Ebert’s original review — he gave the film four stars — Ebert refers to Lester as the film’s “hero”, and empathizes with his desire for Angela: “Lester’s thoughts about Angela are impure, but not perverted; he wants to do what men are programmed to do, with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.” 

I don’t think I agree with Ebert, but it’s hard to put a finger on why. Perhaps it’s because I feel the greatness of art is the swaying of favor. We can empathize in one moment, and recoil in the next, and all about the same subject. Life moves constantly and minutely; it is impossible to maintain a straight line. Lester is our hero, and he is also our villain. He is the stand-in for everyone, his plights representative of our anxieties, manifesting more in metaphor than the literal but still just as potent. His anxieties lead him toward Angela, who represents everything he cannot seem to have: power, desire, confidence. Our anxieties lead us toward many different things. It is possible to understand his journey without condoning his destination. 

—

When I watch American Beauty again, some two years after that laugh on the couch, I am watching it with a roommate. She gets distracted halfway through, one hard cider too many, and wanders upstairs. When we arrive at my favorite scene, I am grateful to be alone. It is the one in the kitchen, near the end, when Jane tells Lester that she is in love. Here is a man, who spent so much time looking for something, only to realize that it is right there in front of him. And when he finds it he smiles, that small, private smile. And I cry until I get a headache. And I know that I cannot get rid of it.

—

So where do we go from here? Is there any convincing left to do, some nugget of truth that needs to be unearthed in order to bring American Beauty back to where it once was? No, I do not think there is. 

Maybe I need to accept that American Beauty is not salvageable. Its reputation is so skewed by time that a new generation cannot see it any other way. And maybe that was destined to happen anyway. Perhaps it is ultimately too of the nineties, too edgy and earnest to come across as anything else. It is a film about pretension that is criticized for being pretentious. Those who have turned their backs on it will unlikely take another look, and I cannot fault them for that. It is not for everyone, like all art isn’t for everyone. And in a #MeToo era, Kevin Spacey’s involvement will most likely prove a gulf too big to cross.

Perhaps going into this piece on the defensive was ultimately the wrong choice. What this really is, really was all along, is a love letter. And a thank you. To all the movies that have made me think, and that I have loved and have loved me back. 

And to American Beauty, most of all, which I love, and for which I feel no shame.