50 Days 50 Films - #38 "American Beauty" (Sam Mendes)

I sort of feel like it's become really popular to hate on this movie these days. When it came out in 1999, it felt like a total revelation and nobody could stop talking about how great it was. And then, just a few years later, it was all about how Hollywood was trying to cynically replicate the indie spirit and Mena Suvari is a shitty actress and Todd Haynes did the whole Suburban dystopia thing so much better in "Far From Heaven" and it's actually a really conservative movie and Alan Ball clearly hates women and someone somewhere was a sellout and blah blah blah blah blah...

Can't we just appreciate a good story?

I'm not going to bother trying to rebut all that invective, aside from saying I really don't see it as woman hating but I guess I can see how you could read it that way. I actually found Annette Benning's character fairly sympathetic. But whatever. Feel free to see in it what you want to see.

For me, I just really connected with the story. I don't know why. I was a 21-year-old death metal kid when I saw it, so I certainly was no 40+ nebbish having a midlife crisis. But there was something about Lester Burnham's (Kevin Spacey) pure sense of need in this film that I plugged into. Spacey found all his little psychological nooks and crannies, and managed to turn a character who (on the page at least) is pretty vile into a complex individual I found myself rooting for.

That holds true across the board for all the characters (except for maybe Wes Bentley's Ricky Fitts, who really does feel like a writer's construction). For the record, my crush on Thora Birch after seeing this movie was intense and complete, and was amplified the following year with her turn in "Ghost World." It was only after she popped up in that really shitty Limp Bizkit video that I kind of wrote her off.

I love Benning in this thing. Chris Cooper knocks it out of the park. Hell, I even like Mena Suvari.

Was this movie overrated at the time? I don't know. Probably. But it's a film I return to every few years or so, and I find it just as emotionally rich and psychologically compelling as I did the first time I saw it. For me, this one has a staying power that, frankly, a lot of those beloved 90s "indie movies" really don't.