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American Booty
Exploring the sordid side of suburbia--again
 Stop and smell the roses: Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari in American Beauty |
Ever since little boxes of ticky-tacky sprung up on the postwar crabgrass, white suburbia has fascinated critics with its perverse mix of conformity and dysfunction, hedonism and postponed gratification, big rooms and suffocating rituals. In the past few years suburban angst films (SubUrbia, The Truman Show, Your Friends and Neighbors, Happiness, The Ice Storm, Pleasantville) have sprawled across the screens, multiplying practically at the rate of strip malls. Now the heavily promoted and critically acclaimed suburban satire American Beauty invades the charged--and, some would say, overdeveloped--erotic territory of the 3 BR, 2 Ba.
The film is the posthumous confession and meditation of one Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a suburban loser turned spiritual seeker. In the year before his death, he tells us, he came alive, animated out of his conformist torpor by a high school cheerleader (Mena Suvari) and the boy next door (Wes Bentley). Lester morphs from an emasculated organization man into a horny hot-rodder who pumps iron, smokes dope, jerks off, and talks back. "You don't get to tell me what to do ever again!" he declares to his strident wife (Annette Bening). "You better watch it, Janie," he warns his disaffected daughter (Thora Birch), "or you're going to turn into a real bitch, just like your mother." "I rule!" Lester gloats at the height of his adolescent insurgency.
The irony of his liberation is that his newly raging machismo finally allows him control over his household, or at least over dinnertime conversation. Indeed, American Beauty is as much about paternal style--absent vs. authoritarian--as male revolt. "I definitely have father issues," screenwriter Alan Ball (also creator of TV's new comedy Oh Grow Up) told the Los Angeles Times. Likewise, Jane opens the film by complaining, "I need a father who's a role model. Not some geek-boy who's going to spray his shorts every time I bring a girlfriend home."
At the house next door, Father (Chris Cooper) hardly knows best: His brutal military-model tactics have resulted in a shell-shocked wife (Allison Janney) and a troubled son (Bentley). The Burnham and Fitts households mirror each other: passive husband/castrating wife on one side of the fence, catatonic wife/dictatorial husband on the other. American Beauty explores the space between these two families by way of the children. Ricky, Bentley's zoom-eyed voyeur, captures the Burnhams' domestic proceedings on videotape (for a vast collection he calls "America's weirdest home videos"), while Birch's seemingly plain Jane captures his attention. "I'm not obsessed," he explains to her, "just interested." Through his camera, Ricky finds avant-garde beauty in the 'burbs, be it a bloody bird or a plastic bag blowing in the wind. "There is this entire life behind things," he philosophizes.
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Also in this Issue
- The Powder Keg Cabaret Balkan and Black Cat, White Cat explode NATO's vision of Yugoslavia (Film)
- Kusturica Keeps the Peace Kusturica's Black Cat, White Cat is a relentless slapstick comedy whose cast of caricatures engage in an endless series of fracases and pratfalls. (Film)
- More articles from this issue...
More Film Articles
- The Big Shrink (Sep 22, 1999)
- The Beat Generation Violent Cop and Boiling Point reveal the roots of Takeshi Kitano's bloody funny cinema (Sep 22, 1999)
- Ghetto Superstar Robin Williams beautifies the unimaginable in Jakob the Liar (Sep 22, 1999)
- When Comedy Boils Over Two weeks before falling into a coma, Martin Lawrence was hardly talking a Blue Streak (Sep 15, 1999)
- About Face "Changing the Guard" reflects the new British cinema's turn toward the personal and the political (Sep 8, 1999)
- Gathering Leaves Director Eric Rohmer tells his Autumn Tale--and a seasoned critic turns the page (Sep 8, 1999)
- Toon In, Turn On Thirty years later, the Beatles' animated Yellow Submarine is still an excellent way to get high (Sep 1, 1999)
- Killing Thee Softly (Aug 25, 1999)
About Leslie Dunlap
From the Archive
- About Face "Changing the Guard" reflects the new British cinema's turn toward the personal and the political (Film - Sep 8, 1999)
- On Eagles' Wings (Film - Aug 25, 1999)
- American Girl At a local history camp, Laura Ingalls Wilder is a goddess and the boys are nowhere to be found (Culture - Aug 25, 1999)
- First Runner-Up A stinging beauty-pageant satire set in Minnesota wins no prizes for congeniality (Film - Jul 21, 1999)
- Killing With Kindness (Film - Jul 21, 1999)
- Hollywood and Vine Disney's Tarzan swings for evolution but slouches toward the primitive (Film - Jun 23, 1999)
- The Age of Work Photographers Lewis W. Hine and David Parker frame the debate over child labor (Arts Feature - Jun 9, 1999)
- Angels and Devils The Dreamlife of Angels and Carrie offer inverse portraits of single white females (Film - Apr 28, 1999)
- More articles from the Leslie Dunlap Archive...
