American Beauty
Capsule Film Review #43
This is the forty-third in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear weekly, in addition to my regular essays.
It’s hard to think of any well-known film which has so much fallen victim to fashion as American Beauty. In 1999, as the film received almost every single plaudit and prize available for the taking, it might have seemed perverse to suggest that it wasn’t that good; now, it seems perverse to suggest that it’s not that bad.
Think then of that alternate timeline where the film was never successful. If you discovered it by chance one night on YouTube or Netflix, wouldn’t you be pleasantly surprised? An interesting failure, perhaps: some terrific performances, a few laughs, some pleasing suburban satire. The worst things in it (you would have to have a heart of stone not to watch that plastic bag and start laughing) wouldn’t seem nearly as bad in that context.
The one thing that probably would—though maybe this says more about me than about it—is the thing that has dated most of all. American Beauty belongs to that subgenre of nineties films—see The Matrix, Fight Club, Office Space—in which the single worst fate imaginable is having a stable job and a comfortable bourgeois existence: in other words, the thing I’m now longing for. Tyler Durden tears down society in order to escape that dark fate; Lester Burnham, just as complacently, tears his own life down.
A year of complete recklessness! Rage and lust, on full redundancy pay, followed by a quick bullet to the head. It sounds rather agreeable, doesn’t it?
Are you a Family Guy fan, Alexander?
There’s a good gag where Peter films a plastic bag blowing in the wind à la American Beauty. God shouts down from the clouds: “It’s just some trash blowing in the wind! Do you have any idea how complicated your circulatory system is!?”
Seth MacFarlane can always be relied upon to bring a supposed benevolent force back down to earth.
The worst fate imaginable in those films is in fact a lack of meaning and a lack of deep connection with other people.
Which is the worst fate imaginable since the dawn of (human) time.