American Beauty Revisited: Does Beauty Really Age?

The late 1990s was an interesting period for films, especially dramas. While you had traditional dramas like Ulee’s Gold, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Music of the Heart, just to name a few, there were also more cutting edge dramas like The Truman Show, The Insider, Magnolia, and LA Confidential, films that lent themselves to being topical, discussing today’s issues in today’s style, and the crown jewel of topical filmmaking in this period was American Beauty.

Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Director, and Lead Actor, American Beauty came onto the scene with comparisons to other groundbreaking films of eras past, like Citizen Kane and The Graduate. Seemingly all audiences viewed the film as the quintessential expression of how everyone was feeling. As Colonel Frank Fitz says in the film, “This country is going straight to hell”.

Of course lines like that come across as even more ironic nowadays, especially when you consider this film was released a full two years before 9/11, and in essence that’s the sort of frame of mind that Sam Mendes and those involved with the film had when making it. It’s kind of funny how it went from a movie about the now and then two years later became a film we wished would still be the now after everything had changed.

And today, it’s nothing less than a time capsule, a window into the soul of the nuclear family living in American suburbia in the 1990s. So audiences today who are new to the film may find American Beauty to be a charming product of its time, an entertaining watch for two hours, but that’s about it. And some audiences today will resist it because of the big elephant in the room, but we’ll address that later.

American Beauty focuses on the Burnham family, father Lester, mother Carolyn, and daughter Janie. All three feel stuck in their lives: Lester’s working a dead-end job as a magazine writer, Carolyn is failing as a real estate broker, and Janie is your standard, everyday depressed teen who’s more worried about her looks than her personality. All three of them are drifting away from each other at the start, and all three end up in very different places by the film’s end.

This is all set into motion when the Fitz family moves in next-door. Lester befriends Ricky, the son, and Ricky sells marajuana to Lester as he begins to rebel. Janie later ends up in a relationship with Ricky, one that tears her away from her best friend, Angela. Meanwhile, Carolyn meets up with her competitor, the “Real Estate King” Buddy and the two begin an affair. Lester also has the hots for Angela, and begins to physically transform his body to Angela’s liking.

Everything comes to a head when Lester, who now works at a fast food joint, Mr. Smiley’s, serves Carolyn while she’s on a date with Buddy. Lester later buys more weed from Ricky, who is spotted by his father and beaten for it, which makes Ricky decide to run away, and he asks Janie to go with him. Carolyn contemplates killing Lester with a handgun, and Lester comes to his senses moments before deflowering Angela.

In the final scene, Lester sits down with Angela, who asks him how he’s doing, to which Lester replies, “I’m great”. He reflects on the answer, walks over to a family photo, and realizes just how great his life is with his loved ones. As he repeats, “Man, oh man,” over and over, an unseen figure, likely Frank Fitz, a closeted marine, blows Lester’s brains out, and Lester, who narrates over the film occasionally, reflects on his life one last time before the film ends.

American Beauty, as I mentioned, was universally praised at release, and for good reason. I put it in a very small list of films like The Godfather, The Dark Knight, and Schindler’s List as films that are perfectly crafted for the type of story they tell. In other words, there isn’t much to add to The Dark Knight to make it more of a cop-drama meets comic book hero, and Coppola didn’t need to cut anything off of The Godfather to make it a better mafia movie.

I also very much appreciate the cinematographer from the late Conrad Hall, who picked up the fifth Oscar win for the film. Whether it’s all the interior shots in the Burnham house, or the iconic shot of Angela dropping rose petals onto Lester while he’s in bed, Hall’s work did not go unnoticed.

Alan Ball’s script is full of witty one-liners, and every character has their shot, with Lester spouting classics like “We’ve met before, but something tells me you’re going to remember me this time” when he spots Buddy and Carolyn on their date, and “Don’t interrupt me, honey” after smashing a dinner plate over a tumultuous dining scene. All three Burnham family members are given an equal chance on screen to change and mold, which, of course, is what all good writing tries to do.

But the highest praise goes out to the actors. Annette Bening, Wes Bentley, and Thora Birch have never been better, Mena Suvari became a sensation as Angela, Chris Cooper and Allison Janney both extended their promising careers with excellent performances, and as mentioned, Kevin Spacey picked up his second Oscar for his portrayal of Lester.

In fact, Spacey’s performance is a tour-de-force, beautifully modulated through the film’s three acts, from Lester being a wimp, to Lester being love-struck and seeking a return to his youthful nature, and finally as the creepy body-building wannabe dad next door as he moves in on Angela. He earns most of the film’s laughs, despite the subject matter being mostly serious, and it may stand as one of the better acting performances of the 1990s.

The problem is I can’t say this now without being facetious, or else I’ll get crucified for praising someone who was uncovered in the #MeToo era. He is the elephant in the room for why some folks may steer clear of this film today if they haven’t seen it, and that’s a shame. I can only try and convince you if you’re on the fence for watching older films which featured actors who, like Spacey, had their dark pasts put into public view.

I must make it clear that the notion of defending the film is by extension defending the actor is ridiculous. There have been plenty of great films throughout history that were made by or featured people who were assholes in real life, and I am a firm believer in separating the art from the artist. I always put it this way: if I met Kevin Spacey (or any other famous person exiled for bad behaviour in their past), I might nod at them, possibly get their autograph, but I wouldn’t want to sit down and have a beer with them.

And that isn’t to say that if you personally are uncomfortable with watching Spacey’s films or James Franco’s films or Harvey Weinstein’s films that you are wrong. It’s a personal choice, but for the most part avoiding those films means depriving yourself of some good flicks, and this is one of them.

As for some more positives in the film, I love the soundtrack. Both Thomas Newman’s score and the songs picked out are pretty perfect. Newman’s score is filled with luscious violins swells and piano solos, but also has some offbeat percussion work and zylophones beats, giving a sense of normal situations with unusual circumstances happening in them. As for the songs, you’ve got everything from pop classics from Bobby Darin, jumping to rock essentials from The Who, to the melancholic current music of Annie Lennox, and it all fits. And the choice of a cover of The Beatles’ “Because” over the end credits is nothing short of a beautiful end.

So yes, technically speaking, the film is just about perfect. The acting and screenwriting are top-notch, and Sam Mendes’ calm direction of these abnormal situations makes everything feel one notch more normal than it should be. The mundane becomes utterly boring, the heightened becomes the mundane, and the extreme becomes heightened. Again, I feel this is a master stroke of storytelling, and a sign of where we were at the time.

To come back to my original point, where this film was a great reflection of where America stood in the late 1990s, suburbians had grown up with the promise of everything getting better when they grew older. Their jobs would be secure, their money would be safe, and conflict would be an idea of a bygone era.

Of course, none of that was true, and as a result, the American public was angry about it, but not outwardly. Instead, their anger was inwardly focused and directed, and those who had the artistic means wrote out their problems on the page, or painted them onto a landscape, or channeled into a stage or screen performance. But we all yearned to see someone show some humanity by taking the actions they desperately wanted to take, thought you didn’t have the courage to do themselves. So seeing characters like Lester and Carolyn break free from their cycle of normal livelihood was revolutionary.

However, the film’s final message is one that says that moderation is okay, as long as it isn’t taken too far. Lester, who is essentially trying to become a pedophile by having sex with a minor, realizes what he is doing before the deed is done, and comes to his senses about how he shouldn’t be treating his own family like second class. The same day he had warned his daughter not to become a bitch like her mother.

Another film that came out around this time was Pleasantville, a joyous work from Gary Ross, which followed a couple of 90s twins as they were transported into a 1950s era television show called Pleasantville, and by not following the rules ended up changing the show, symbolized by everything in the black-and-white environment changing to technicolor. American Beauty is similar in its final message: your younger life was not as good as you remember it. Be thankful that you have what’s in front of you.

The tagline for Beauty was “Look Closer”, which is a bit ambiguous. Should we look closer at our own lives to examine what’s wrong with it? Should we look closer at those around us and change ourselves to be more like them? Or should we look closer and truly think about what we have and not focus on what we don’t have?

All of these messages are personified, again in the three-act-structure, by the changes that occur with all three of the Burnham characters. We may relate to Lester’s wanting to get rid of the wimp image, or Carolyn being freed by her affair, and Janie’s change of heart of being so inwardly focused and hateful, and change is a good thing, but too much of it makes us lose sight of what we hold dear.

The big question is: does this message hold up for today’s audiences? I think it does. America is as divided now as we were in the 1970s during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Change is in the air, seemingly everywhere we look. However, we are running the risk of having too many Lester Burnhams out there, and I don’t mean men chasing high school girls around (though that is a problem). There is a sense of extremism being rewarded.

What made Lester such a standout character was his ability to break free of the cycle of normality, because he wasn’t where he wanted to be. As he broke free, he started to plant seeds of anger and hatred toward his wife and daughter, which is pretty extreme. And had he not been woken up from his spell of raging hormones in the last act, he might well have abandoned his family.

In the same way today, there is a sense of reinforcement behind the idea of leaving the family. If they’re not doing what you want them to do, drop ‘em. That seems to be the current day mantra. That’s what made that scene of waking up necessary, and it needs to happen to today’s generation, too. That way we can all come back down to earth and remember that we’re all in this together, and we can’t let little differences list out who among us are our enemies and abandon those who have been by our sides all our lives.

That is not to say that all the changes happening today are bad. Lester getting into shape and growing a backbone improved him, just as Carolyn grew more confident in herself and her abilities after having some side action with Buddy, and Janie sheds her emo image by the end of the film, if not physically at least mentally.

These are all positives changes that we can all point to as positive influences. And audiences today can look to these as great changes, just as long as they remember that when they change something, it means killing something else they once had. Which is why I feel American Beauty is as much a cautionary tale as it is a drama.

American Beauty warns us not to kill off our family photos over the high-school girl next door. Look closer at what you have and feel fear when you think about it being taken away. The bottom line of the film is to truly love your loved ones as best you can, and don’t lose them or drive them away. Because if you do, you’re losing all sense of the natural beauty you’ve created for yourself.