When we first meet Lester Burnham, the protagonist of Oscar favourite American Beauty, he is masturbating in the shower. A reasonable way to start the day, one might think, except it’s a sign of Lester’s fundamental frustration. There is another, hilarious, wanking scene later in the film, which makes one realise that apart from teen comedies like American Pie the issue of masturbation has not been very comprehensively, er, handled in Hollywood cinema. But that’s another thesis.
Lester (Kevin Spacey) is an advertising executive nearing middle age: for all his apparent success and stability, his existence is beginning to seem rather meaningless. He has a perky estate-agent wife (Annette Bening), who would like to believe in and inhabit the “bright shiny world” of the Lawrence Welk songs she favours; they and their sulky teenage daughter (Thora Birch) are ensconced in their generous suburban home somewhere in Middle America. So far so normal; so far so American Dream.
But, as Lester tells us in a Sunset Boulevard-style voice-over (which is used with great skill throughout the film), “In less than a year I’ll be dead. Of course I don’t know that yet – in a way I’m dead already.” His life seems somehow drained of, well, life; drained, perhaps, of beauty.
That beauty he finds in one of his daughter’s blonde cheerleader friends, and his sudden infatuation causes him to spark to life again, setting off a rollercoaster of change in him and his family. “I feel like I’ve been in a coma for about 20 years,” he says, “and I’m just now waking up.”
His reawakening is accelerated by the Burnhams’ new neighbours, the Fritz family, which comprises ultra-macho marine dad, virtually catatonic mom, and creepy son Ricky (Wes Bentley), who, when he’s not supplying high-quality dagga, is given to spying on the Burnhams via video-cam. His attentiveness will soon add to the hurlyburly of the Burnhams’ tempestuous sea change.
British theatrical director Sam Mendes makes such an assured meal of American Beauty that it’s hard to believe this is his first feature film. Of course he has the considerable advantage of a witty, elegant script by television writer Alan Ball – what a difference a really good script makes! And how good it is to see a movie that is both deeply serious and consistently funny.
Spacey is quite brilliant: there is something in his performance that is continuous with the manipulative murderers he played so well in The Usual Suspects and Seven, and yet it is completely different. He has the ability to suggest whole icebergs of feeling lurking dangerously beneath a somewhat sarcastic surface, to give Lester a rounded personality as well as a dimension of irony.
Bening, too, is excellent – possibly a career peak. The tension she maintains between her character’s brittle facade and her inner turmoil makes her both amusingly annoying and touchingly sympathetic. When Lester, watching her through the window as she picks roses (roses are a recurring presence in the film), says, “We used to be happy,” the words are invested with all the sadness in the world.
The whole cast, indeed, is very good, though special mention must go to Bentley as Ricky Fritz. Appropriately nicknamed “Psycho Boy” at school, he has the still menace of a young Anthony Perkins. Peter Gallagher and his Groucho Marx eyebrows even pop up in a small but neatly effective role.
If American Beauty gets the best-movie Oscar, it will be richly deserved. And the same goes for the best script, best actor, actress and supporting-role Oscars, too. It is a superb example of an American movie poised confidently between commercialism and art: accessible, gripping, well-made, detailed, clever and moving, yet entirely free of the easy formulas and moralistic condescension of your average Hollywood product. Compare it, if you can bear to when it arrives in early April, to the new Kevin Costner vehicle, which also deals with issues of ageing and love. Now that’s a wank.