The Boys of Summer

To the list of movie characters who look back on their lives from the Beyond, add Lester Burnham, the 42-year-old, dead narrator of American Beauty. He is a murder victim--so it would seem, to judge from the very broad hints in the opening scene--done in by someone in his immediate circle; and so you might associate him with Joe Gillis of Sunset Boulevard. A nasty piece of business, that Joe: conniving, sarcastic and more than a little self-pitying, even when he's floating face-down in Norma Desmond's swimming pool. You can see why Lester, as a rough equivalent, might be played by Kevin Spacey, who with a dimpled smile can sing you whole arias of mortal insult, mezzo-piano legato.

The problem with American Beauty is that it traps Joe Gillis in George Bailey's world. It plays to the audience's lust for misbehavior--Kevin Spacey unloosed on suburbia!--while proposing that we all turn into angels when we die, and receive wings to the accompaniment of little tinkling bells.

Complexity, say quite a few of my colleagues. Lies, I say.

Written by Alan Ball and directed by Sam Mendes, American Beauty begins with a Lester who is "dead already" while dwelling in his house with the white picket fence. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), a monster of color-coordinated decorum, is first shown snipping at her roses, in a gesture meant to imply that Lester's drooping bud lies caught in her shears. His daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), first shown in sullen, semi-recumbent monologue, describes Lester as a "horny geek-boy" who ought to be "put out of his misery"--a misery she helps enforce by reminding him, at dinner, that he's a loser who has nothing to say to her. "I am a loser," Lester assures us in voiceover, just before we see him in his doorless cubicle at Media Monthly magazine, where he rewords press releases and calls the results journalism.

So far, American Beauty offers no more satirical insight than an episode of Married...With Children and considerably less than a Dilbert strip. The only gesture that escapes the conventions of sitcom or newspaper cartoon is a shot of Lester masturbating in his morning shower. With this as its sole stroke of authenticity, American Beauty introduces Lester's primary goal: to renew himself by returning to adolescence.

The immediate cause of his regression--or is it a first symptom?--is a bad crush on Angela (Mena Suvari), his daughter's best friend and cheerleading buddy. When Lester dreams of Angela, rose petals magically shower upon his face or float free from her loosened sweater--picturesquely, repeatedly, so you won't miss the innocence of his desires or the pun in the movie's title. If only the filmmakers had trusted in the eloquence of even a blank stare from Kevin Spacey! By letting his hard little button-eyes turn soft, he allows you to peer part of the way into that dark chamber where his words gather, rounding themselves, secreting heavy juices. They will roll from his lips smoothly but never in a hurry, leaving you to wonder, with some unease, at how Spacey's extraordinary-sounding utterances ripen behind that smooth, bland face. Maybe, if you delved into the mystery of the process, you'd catch glimpses of a man like Lester Burnham, only more vital, angry, intelligent and hurt. Spacey seems willing to show you all that--but it's apparently too much for Mendes and Ball. They'd rather move on quickly to the next picturesque moment and the next caricature.

So, under Angela's spell, Lester transforms himself by jokey stages into a 42-year-old teenager, who spends many happy hours in the garage, working out with weights, smoking dope and listening to his Bob Dylan tapes. Through such exertions, he gains a teenager's insight into the falsity of social conventions--an insight that he turns against his wife. Lester speechifies at her about the joy and spontaneity she's lost; and to prove that his bud is no longer caught in those shears, he threatens her, too, tossing and smashing things as an assertion of manhood. I wish I could say that American Beauty presents this latter form of acting-out as an adolescent disorder. But while it treats Lester's horniness as a shower of rose petals and his rages as occasions for liberating laughter, the film uses Carolyn principally as a target. Fans of the picture will no doubt object that Carolyn is given a moment of high-pitched self-hatred, shot in the head-on, tableau-vivant style that Mendes favors. But it's hard for me to generalize that one gesture toward the character into an attitude of sympathy. American Beauty is unmistakably Lester's film. He's the complex one; Carolyn is merely grotesque.

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