American Beauty - 10 years after

I remember watching “American Beauty” 10 years ago and thinking, “this is a fantastic movie”. I’ve written at length about that movie before so I won’t do that again. But what made me suddenly think about that movie was reading about this: yes, Wes Bentley, that pot dealer who introduced everybody to drugs and invited them to turn on, is being sued by American Express for what he’s owed them in back payments.

I think, time has not been kind to the various people who were involved in the movie. They have never gotten back the same kind of acclaim that they had for “American Beauty”. Either they went downhill, or “American Beauty” was an accidental masterpiece, which fell into place because it just articulated what was on the minds of a lot of people at that time. I’m beginning to suspect it was half and half.

I think that the 90s were a bit like the 60s. It was a time when Americans were prosperous, and could afford to think about crazy ideas. It was a time when the world went collectively nuts and bought into the dot com stock craze. (Imagine how much money was lost in that bubble!). It was a time when there was a great cultural war waged between the conservatives and the liberals. It was a utopian time, when people were wondering if the world had changed forever, that the old cold war, pre-internet rules no longer applied to society. It was a time when counterculture was on the rise – instead of the hippies and Haight-Asbury, we had Kurt Cobain, REM and Radiohead, bands that were much less mainstream than the icons of the 80s – Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince.

But the merits of the film – I think that the ideas articulated were a little confused, just as 60s counterculture was confused. It was a time of great hope, a lot of talk about revolutionary change, but nothing really permanent and really significant materialised. I have not watched it a second time. The first time, it was a magical experience. Actually a lot of films I watched around that time were all magical. But I don’t want to spoil it. And I don’t want to get lost in a dream – there are very few fates that are worse than that.

Kevin Spacey had a few good roles, in “Se7en”, “the Usual Suspects”, “LA Confidential”. His role as Lester Burnham more or less carried the whole film. It was a great performance, and people were marking him for even greater things after that. But it was to be the peak of his career. A few good but not great roles followed: “Shipping News”, “K-PAX”, etc.

Annette Bening, the woman who managed to “tame” Warren Beatty. Remarkably, they are still married. She continued to get raves for movies like “Being Julia” and “Mrs Harris” but the movies themselves did not get a lot of attention.

Thora Birch was the goth daughter of Lester Burnham. They also considered Christina Ricci for the role, and you could see why. Afterwards, she was supposed to be the next Christina Ricci, and she had one good film in “Ghost World”. But after that – not much luck.

Wes Bentley was another person who was tipped for better things, having delivered that monologue about “there’s so much beauty in this world”. But other than a starring role in “Four Feathers”, he’s not starred in anything major. He’s still young and things could still happen. Or not. He’s just like David Bentley, fading after an early promise.

Mena Suvari, who was the hot chick in that bathtub, and the person Lester Burnham thinks about while masturbating, you’d expect her to be as hot as ever. But she’s now firmly slot in that “supporting roles for hot chicks” role.

Make no mistake, all the actors that I mentioned here are good actors, and a few are superb. Many have continued to put in good work, but none of them have achieved the heights of “American Beauty”. None of them can be considered failures – but Wes Bentley is dangerously close.

Sam Mendes is the director, and he’s done a few films afterwards – Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road. Revolutionary Road was a return to form, but hardly the equal of American Beauty, even as it also was similar in that it displayed the petty disappointments of the suburban existence. He also did a lot of stage directing in that time.

The one person who has moved on from “American Beauty” is Alan Ball. Not the England World Cup winning footballer, but the scriptwriter of “American Beauty”, and to my mind, the main hero in it. A lot of the sharpness of that movie came from the script, the strong characterization. A lot of the characters are stereotypes, but none of them are really 2 dimensional. His script does what very few scripts these days do: it has the ability to surprise and inspire.

1999 was a year in which there were 3 movies that promised to herald a better future for cinema: “The Matrix”, “Fight Club” and “American Beauty”. But to my mind this promise was largely unfulfilled in the 2000s.