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American Beauty - 4/5

Unlike Braveheart, this movie has aged well. Granted I watched it with the commentary of Sam Mendes rather than the actual dialogue this time, but still. The point holds.

If you haven’t seen it, American Beauty is a tale of life and the beauty therein. Not the superficial beauty, but the beauty of small moments, the beauty of gusts of air, or death, or reality.

The acting throughout is superb and the source material is pretty good as well. My main quibbles with the story is that I find the ending to be trite bullshit (SPOILER WARNING :: the idea of a repressed homosexual southern military man is just too cliche to enjoy. I mean, c’mon, people. :: END SPOILER). This movie made Chris Cooper a name (well, this and Adaptation) and provides some of the strongest performances from Annette Benning and Kevin Spacey’s career.

Of note from the voiceover: I always took Angela Hayes’ (Mena Suvari) declaration that she was a virgin to Lester to be a lie. I thought it was in her character that she would expect that her lover would really want to hear that, so that’s what she said. It had the opposite effect on Lester, of course, but still… a lie, I thought. However, Mendes and the writer Alan Ball said she was speaking honestly.

Frankly, I don’t buy it. It doesn’t fit the character as we know it (though it puts her in a different light, particularly her grilling Jane on sex with Ricky – I took it as a clinging for control over her formerly compliant “friend”). No one as cruel and as self-focused as Angela (who was aware that men wanted her since she was 12), would not have had sex by then. It’s a form of power and self-adulation that Angela would not have hesitated to use. Anyway, I don’t care what the guy who wrote it says, she’s a loose woman and was lying to Lester and very little you could say would change my mind.