(reviewed at marple 10 on halloween, 1999 with morton and stu)
American Beauty was written for the silver screen and never appeared on stage, yet if feels like a Broadway hit in the same vein as a really good dialogue heavy hard-edged play. Kevin Spacey is a suburban husband and 9 to 5er at an advertising agency. Annette Benning is his obsessive wife whose real goal is to be the number one real estate saleswoman in the area. They have a troubled daughter and a shady video camera operating neighborhood boy who expresses zero emotion. His father is a tough military brute.
This is American Beauty, the simple tale of these character and this life and they attempt to break free from their everyday life and into something, new, fresh, exciting, wonderful.
Spacey quits his job, blackmails his boss, starts smoking pot and working out and lusts after his daughter’s blonde haired bombshell who is more empty headed then we can imagine. At one point in the film the blonde bimbo asks Spacey, “Am I ordinary?”, as if it were some absurd curse to be the same old thing.
The film has a rich script which definitely feels like a good play. The film is more character driven then most flicks out there, and this is the reason why it is getting such a good dose of early Oscar buzz and critical raves. Each actor and actress has plenty of room to act their heart out and tons of enthusiastic lines and small character arcs. The plot of the film is more or less another morbid, underbelly of the suburbs type deal, but it plays out well and exciting. The movie starts off minimally okay but ends up growing on you until the final showdown with the rain pouring down and the characters doing their business.
Kevin Spacey’s final moment with his femme fatale is especially moving, the quietness of the scene and the dialogue between them. The other characters are all well rounded except for the more or less one-note wife, Annette Benning, who isn’t the world’s best actress and proves it here. She doesn’t have much to do and it is extremely obvious that a man wrote the entire thing.
The story that goes along with how the film ever got made goes like this: Steven Spielberg, one of the honchos at Dreamworks SKG read the script one night and the next day put it on the fast track. They got The Blue Room’s (that play where Nicole Kidman showed off her tits for an extremely short amount of time but because of it the London and New York runs were sold out) Sam Mendes to direct and got a healthy cast and a great set designer and it was their Oscar foray for the last year of the century. This is not the kind of script you would think Spielberg would love, but underneath it all it makes sense. Spielberg is stuck in his good guy happy director phase with his adopted kids and wife. Maybe he liked what Spacey did. Spacey got out of it. He started smoking his pot and lifting weights and exercising and actually got up and out of the endless pit this world supposedly is. Spielberg is like all of us after
all. ***
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