American Beauty

I feel like I've been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I'm just now waking up.

A review by Mike Shea   Movie Rating: ( * * * * * )    DVD Rating: ( * * * * * )

For a comparison of American Beauty to the noir piece, Fight Club read Mike's Comparison of Fight Club to American Beauty.

While many days I wake up and wonder if this is the day the soldiers in jack-boots will come in to take away my copy of Clockwork Orange and replace it with a copy of Stewart Little, others I wake up and am happy to know that as long as movies like American Beauty are still getting made, our society might just survive after all. I can almost understand why the feminazis and the right wing Christian fundamentalists managed to keep Fight Club from going mainstream, but American Beauty, a movie about adultery with 16 year olds, gets five academy awards. There is still hope. American Beauty is probably one of the top three best movies of 1999 along with Fight Club and Being John Malkovich. All three are about the breakdown of standard social values and the awakening of something deep within us that has been repressed for thousands of years of social conditioning. The movie is a perfect blend of intelligent comedy and subtle drama. While the migration of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening) is quite dramatic, the depth of Rickie Fits (an excellent Wes Bentley) is far more subtle until he gets into his painful "There is so much beauty in the world" speech about half way through. One of the best examples of this subtlety is in his first interaction with his father in the car on the way to school where he takes his fathers homophobic ideas up a notch, just to get his father to leave him alone. The Lolita like relationship of Lester Burnham with Angela Hayes (Mina Suvari, a girl I know only one person removed ) is probably uncomfortable to watch, but his initial fantasies are wonderfully put together. The DVD is truly a collectors edition, with both a Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS soundtrack, as well as a 16x9 enhanced 2.35 to 1 transfer. As long as movies such as this still continue to come out, I cannot truly chastise our society for taking artwork and doing everything but burning them in a big pile in the middle of the street. On the other hand, I weep for the movies that never see the light of day because Disney thinks that a six-year-old will shoot his teacher for seeing a breast or hearing the word fuck.

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