Twenty-five years ago, in one of the greatest ever years for film, a relatively low budget character study opened in American cinemas. It did not have anything like the hype of the year’s flashier films – Fight Club, The Matrix, The Phantom Menace, Eyes Wide Shut – and was the work of a first-time British director, Sam Mendes, who had won accolades for his work in the theatre but was an untested quantity on screen.
The screenplay was by a former sitcom writer named Alan Ball, and its cast included the Oscar-winning character actor Kevin Spacey in the lead, along with the estimable but hardly commercially pyrotechnic likes of Annette Bening, Chris Cooper and Allison Janney, along with some younger actors making early appearances in cinema, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari and Wes Bentley.
The first indication that American Beauty – budgeted at a modest $15 million, and distributed by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks Pictures – might be more than another tasteful study of American suburbia came at its rapturously received premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. It went on to sell-out screenings in New York and Los Angeles, before opening wide across the country at the beginning of October.
Critical acclaim followed – Kenneth Turan, influential critic of the Los Angeles Times, called it “a hell of a picture” – and made a fortune at the box office, taking $356 million worldwide. It also managed to sweep the major Oscars in 2000, winning Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor for Spacey and Best Original Screenplay.
The films it beat in that year’s awards race included M Night Shyamalan’s twisty ghost story, The Sixth Sense, Frank Darabont’s prison saga The Green Mile and Michael Mann’s excellent The Insider. Most of the pictures that have been remembered and venerated over the past quarter-century – Magnolia, The Talented Mr Ripley, Being John Malkovich and Election, to name but a few – were not even nominated for Best Film that year, despite being eligible. Instead, it was the self-congratulatory, hermetically sealed smugness of Mendes and Ball’s film that most impressed Academy voters.
Its Day-Glo retread of Death of a Salesman, with added schmaltz and camp, had enough intellectual and aesthetic covering to look as if it was a great and important film, even though, if one dug beneath its façade, American Beauty had no more weight and depth than the plastic bag its stoner-sage, Bentley’s Ricky Fitts, takes such pride in filming.
A quarter-century on, American Beauty has become something of a joke. As Matthew Jacobs succinctly put it in the Huffington Post five years ago, “What was once a provocative masterstroke now looks like retrograde hooey.” Like Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, which was acclaimed to the skies upon its release but is now regarded as monumentally misguided and bafflingly overpraised, Mendes’s picture has faced the most brutal of turnarounds when it comes to its public standing. Some of this, inevitably, is because of the recent history of its star, who may be a two-time Oscar winner but now, after the tawdriness of various allegations against him – as well as various trials in which, lest we forget, he has not been convicted or found liable of the accusations against him.
But even before Spacey’s reputation plummeted so steeply, there were already murmurings that the film for which he won his second Academy Award was a bewildering example of the new mediocrity.
Comparisons were made with Robert Redford’s unexceptional family drama Ordinary People which won Best Film at the 1980 Oscars over Raging Bull, and 1990, in which Kevin Costner’s epic western Dances with Wolves triumphed over Goodfellas. Yet a decade later, American Beauty did not beat one deserving film, but a dozen. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, for instance, contains more wit, invention and genuine shock value in a single sequence than the Oscar-winning film does throughout the entirety of its 122-minute length.
Still, unworthy decisions of this nature are made by the Academy more than once a decade, and many equally poor films have been similarly rewarded. Yet what is so fascinating about the decline of American Beauty is the way in which all of its once-praised facets – Spacey’s performance, Ball’s script, Thomas Newman’s score, even that infernal plastic bag – have now come to be seen as somewhere between problematic and inept, as you might expect from a film that features, at its heart, a portrayal of a paedophilic infatuation that is treated with both reverence and affection.
Imagine if Lolita was to be remade with the indulgence offered to Hector in The History Boys – he may be a paederast, but he’s our sort of paederast – and you’re getting close to the sheer grimness with which Spacey’s character Lester Burnham’s infatuation with Suvari’s rose-covered nymphet comes over today. Burnham behaves in a way that, under normal circumstances, would see his computers and mobile devices taken off for close examination by the police, on the justifiable suspicion that there’d be vile things concealed in hard drives and on WhatsApp groups.
In the context of the strangely forgiving film, Lester’s unseemly fixation is merely another demonstration of the fundamentally false credo that lies at its heart: that there is so much beauty to be found in the world, often in wholly unexpected places, that if you don’t look around once in a while, you might miss it.
This has all the profundity and originality of an American Express advertisement tagline – if, for some reason, American Express decided to associate itself with sex offenders. It’s a shock to remember that this was, at the time, all seen as broadly acceptable. MTV even nominated a particularly grim scene between Spacey and Suvari for Best Kiss, much to the studio’s dismay. They had form in this regard.
The previous year, a similar moment between Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain in the Adrian Lyne version of Lolita – sex abuse as perfume ad – had been singled out for such recognition, too. In 2021, when allegations against Spacey mounted, Suvari said she felt “weird and unusual vibes” from Spacey on set. To prepare for an intimate scene together, Spacey asked that they “lay on a bed very close to one another”. She recalled: “He was sort of gently holding me. It was very peaceful but weird and unusual.”
Still, times and mores change, and it is perhaps unfair to attack American Beauty for what happened later in both society and Spacey’s career. Speaking about how potential 20th anniversary celebrations were nixed by “Kevin”, Thora Birch said: “It hurts. It’s traumatic. The allegations [against him] have nothing to do with the movie.”
Better, then, to take aim at its arrogant ineptitude. The writing is poor throughout, alternating between fortune cookie platitudes and would-be cutting displays of bitchiness, and, perhaps most surprisingly given Mendes’s enormous skills as a theatre (and, later, cinema) director, the performances, Spacey aside, are largely dismal. Bening starts at theatrical camp and goes up, or down, from there, and Peter Gallagher, as her smarmy real estate lover Buddy, offers an inferior retread of Charlie Higson’s sublime work in The Fast Show as the would-be Lothario car salesman Swiss Toni. Suvari and Birch look startled, as well they might; Bentley merely seems bored, being less an enigmatic poet of mystery and more that creepy camera-wielding guy who should be avoided at all costs.
Cooper, meanwhile, can do little with that most one-dimensional of characters, the closeted military man Frank who eventually becomes murderous. To this day I’m unsure as to whether Mendes and Ball realise that the key visual gag that precipitates the climax – Frank sees Lester and Ricky, his son, enjoying a joint together, but from the angle he’s watching, it looks as if Ricky is giving Lester oral sex – has been lifted from a similar scene in Carry On Camping, in which it looks as if Terry Scott and Betty Marsden are doing unspeakable things by silhouette in their tent.
Coincidentally, the same joke was used earlier that year in the Austin Powers sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me, indicating a remarkable degree of pre-millennial influence for a joke about a woman supposedly removing steadily more improbable items from her husband’s bottom.
It did not take long for the American Beauty backlash to kick in. It was parodied repeatedly in Family Guy in 2001, with the hapless patriarch Peter Griffin watching a plastic bag sway pointlessly in the breeze, and declaring, in a deliberate echo of the film, “There’s so much beauty in the world it makes my heart burst.” At the time of American Beauty’s release, it was a boost that Bill Clinton called it “amazing”; three years later, with Clinton’s reputation traduced, the late night TV show host Jay Leno was able to joke that “A distinguished president like Bill Clinton… [whose] favourite film is about a guy trapped in a loveless marriage who’s obsessed with having sex with a young girl.”
Over and over again, the film has been pilloried and excoriated as empty, tasteless and fundamentally rotten, a pleased-with-itself sitcom script gussied up as profundity.
In fact, American Beauty is now so reviled that there has been a counter-backlash as defenders come forward to make the case for it. Last year, the critic Geoffrey MacNab wrote in the Independent, amidst the Spacey scandal, that the film remains “a compelling portrait of suburban angst and despair”. He went on: “It was brilliantly shot by veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall, features a series of exceptional performances from its ensemble cast and ventured into murky, dangerous territory that contemporary filmmakers won’t go near.”
And there will be others, too, who contend that it is now so mocked that it is in danger of being underappreciated, as well as pointing out that many still admire it. It is currently rated the 77th greatest film of all time on IMDB, between the original Oldboy and Avengers: Endgame.
It is unfortunate that its strongest individual element – Spacey’s still-excellent performance, which conveys frustration and anger and sorrow with little more than tiny facial modulations – has been so degraded by its lead actor’s cancellation, but at least Hall’s cinematography is superb, and justly deserving of its Oscar. It’s just a shame that the film that it accompanies remains a classic case of the emperor’s new clothes, growing more unimpressive and shrill with every passing year.
Beauty may, indeed, be found in the most unexpected places, but just as the key visual motif of the abandoned plastic bag may strike us now as trite and inconsequential, so a film that once set middle-class dinner parties and book groups on both sides of the Atlantic ablaze with praise seems now both ephemeral and unpleasant.
“Look closer”, the film’s tagline urged viewers. They did. A quarter of a century later, many have come, vehemently, to dislike what this examination has revealed. Chances are that this one isn’t going to be remade any time soon.
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