Sam Mendes’s slick American Beauty doesn’t age well. It’s daring in a way that it sympathizes with a protagonist who’s probably a pedophile, though its portrait of an American family on the brink of collapse is essentially a cartoon. In a Swank-less year, Annette Bening would have won an Oscar for her turn as Carolyn, a real estate agent and psychotic mom so emotionally frayed she’s become a caricature of her previous self, slapping herself silly in one scene when she fails to sell a house. (Bening’s expression of how the personal affects the professional is the film’s greatest asset.) The performances by the young actors are equally fine, even though Wes Bentley’s Ricky Fitts is pure hyperbole, an exaggeration of soulful teenage-ness, and the little secret that torments Mena Suvari’s cheerleader is offered by the filmmakers as a trite rationale for the character’s sluttiness. Lester (Kevin Spacey), a horny baby boomer with a taste for teenage skin, headlines this freak show that includes a next-door neighbor who is a Nazi-lover and latent homosexual (Chris Cooper) and whose wife (Allison Janney) is a laughable vision of a woman stunned into submission after years of bullet-fire intimidation. Screenwriter Alan Ball is essentially a peddler of smut, but Mendes directs with the brio of a carnival ringmaster, and the film’s wind-down is gripping in its over-the-topness. At its worst, the film’s message is cornball: one does not need to be extraordinary to be ordinary. At its best, American Beauty sometimes amuses in its attempts to expose the grotesqueries of suburban life.
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You do not have permission to dismiss this movie, it’s a classic.
‘It’s daring in that it sympathizes with a protagonist who’s a pederast..’
That is, I believe, a man who desires or engages in sexual activity with a boy. Wrong word.
‘the little secret that torments Mena Suvari’s cheerleader is offered by the filmmakers as a trite rationale for the character’s sluttiness’
I figure that ‘the little secret’ is simply that this cheerleader is not slutty. The phenomenon has been described as the “slut-that-never-was”. Of course we can pursue not just how she pretends to be easy but also, how, it seems, she does this for very specific reasons. She imitates sexual prowess, to hide her insecurities. Surely, you get that none of this is true, when she discusses her sexual misadventures in graphic and voyeuristic detail. You mention ‘the little secret — her virginal status. Maybe it’s trite to say of this that ‘the angel, is pretending to be a slut’. Well, she’s not a woman, is she? She’s trying to be a woman. She is not sure exactly what a woman is.