AMERICAN BEAUTY

AMERICAN BEAUTY

Directed by Sam Mendes. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening

‘IT’S AMAZING when you realise you still have the ability to surprise yourself; it makes you wonder what else you can do that you’d forgotten about.’

It’s difficult to know where to start when it comes to verbally illustrating the complete and utter fucking magnificence of American Beauty: I I first thought it was a runaway cert for 2000’s Film of the Year, but I now don’t doubt that it’s also a serious pacesetter in the Film of the Century shakedown.

From the word go, the movie resounds with a universal relevance – it’s about death, it’s about spiritual rebirth, it’s about the conflict between living life and wasting it. American Beauty captures both the pain and the beauty of human existence in all its kaleidoscopic complexity, while illustrating humankind’s remarkable capacity for self-regeneration in the most uplifting fashion imaginable. And if all this sounds a tad on the heavy side, fear not – it’s also one of the laugh-out-loud funniest and most phenomenally entertaining films ever to grace a widescreen.

Lester Burnham (Spacey) is a middle-aged office drone with what seems on the surface to be a perfectly happy, affluent suburban existence: impeccably-manicured front garden, two cars in the driveway, swimming-pool out the back, a successful and attractive wife, an intelligent teenage daughter, and a reasonably high-powered job.

Yet it doesn’t take more than a minute for the audience to twig that Lester is deeply, deeply dissatisfied with his lot: jaded, depressed, utterly devoid of joy, spontaneity or affection – in short, spiritually dead. The movie opens with his alarm clock waking him up and throwing into focus the prospect of another dreary day in limbo: barely a minute later, we observe him whacking off in the shower while Spacey’s weary voice-over announces: “This will be the highlight of my day. After this, it’s straight downhill all the way.”

Relations in the family Burnham, on all sides, are pitched somewhere between spiky hostility and overt hatred: Lester’s marriage to uptight career-obsessed wife Carolyn has effectively ceased to function, and is poisoned by a massive mutual antagonism. Meanwhile, their teenage daughter Jane (Thora Burch) suffers silently but severely from the prevailing domestic atmosphere, no-one displays the faintest inclination to change things for the better, and life goes on in a fashion that more clearly resembles death – when suddenly, as Travis Bickle once said, there is a change.

The cue for Lester’s mid-life wake-up call arrives when he and Carolyn dutifully troop along to watch Jane perform a half-time cheerleading routine for the local school basketball team. Lester’s eye is caught by his daughter’s fellow cheerleader and best friend Angela (Mena Suvari, the blue-eyed blondie from American Pie) and he becomes instantly entranced. Young, self-assured, supremely attractive – and infused with the unhealthy excess of self-confidence common to natural born sex goddesses – Angela knocks him for six, and Lester makes no attempt whatsoever to conceal his lust for her. This triggers absolute revulsion in his daughter, of course, but proves to be the catalyst (as opposed to the direct cause) for the joyfully inspirational spiritual awakening which takes hold of Lester over the course of the movie’s duration.

Meanwhile, a new family has moved in next door: domineering, stiff-necked US Marine Col. Fitts (Chris Cooper) tyranically lords it over his only son Ricky (Wes Bentley) who spies constantly on Jane with a video-camera and appears to be one of the most unnerving psychopaths in cinematic history. Ricky acts on his obsession with Jane by befriending her father, in what transpires to be a hugely rewarding acquaintance for both parties – Ricky deals in high-quality grass, which Lester is more than willing to purchase on a regular basis. Power-balances suddenly shift in the Burnham abode: Carolyn looks on appalled, shocked and helpless as her middle-aged husband takes to working out and smoking dope, and the fact that he’s learnt to smile again is simply more than she can stand.

I’ve given nothing away so far – in fact, I’ve hardly scratched the surface. There’s so much going on in every single scene of this rich, complex masterpiece that a thousand-page book would do very well to capture all its nuances. The six key characters are as expertly-drawn and as tangibly real as any in recent cinema – Cooper is nothing short of stunning as the military-minded Great Santini figure whose hardline approach to parenting has profound repercussions on his only son, while Bentley is by far the most promising debut actor I’ve seen since Ed Norton.

As for Annette Bening’s character – they never wrote ‘em like this before. On the surface, she’s a tightly-wound ball of anger, frustration and vindictive malice, a slave to consumerist living and a spiritual prisoner of wealth, her spitfire tongue spewing out an incessant jet-stream of undiluted venom. Yet somehow, you pity her more than anyone – her tearful breakdowns mark her out as the most truly pained individual in the whole parade, someone who’s long since forgotten how to live and whose humanity can never be recaptured.

Comedies don’t get blacker than this, unless Todd Solondz happens to be the director – and yet, few works of art have ever managed to craft such life-affirming optimism from such rock-bottom despair. There’s enough loneliness, tragedy and bitterness in this picture to send you running away at the speed of light, yet somehow, everyone who watches it should emerge re-charged, invigorated and utterly uplifted. It knocked me out with the force of a fucking earthquake, and I suspect I won’t forget it in a hurry.

Recommended.