Eccentric Flower:199910/American Beauty

Rather than write about the recent journey into the swamplands, I am going to do a little film dissection while it's still fresh in my mind. Nonelvis and I have seen American Beauty this evening, as promised, and I know some of you are waiting impatiently for me to eat my words.

As you'll recall, my ardent readers, one and all, took some trouble to inform me that there was more to this film than met the eye, and that it wouldn't be what the ads and articles led me to expect.

Well, the ardent readers are correct on both counts - but I was more than a third of the way into the movie before I realized it.

I suppose I should put up a spoiler warning before I proceed - although this isn't the kind of movie that really has spoilers. If you don't know that Kevin Spacey's character narrates the events in flashback after his death, and that the film ends with his murder, then you are living in a cave. I knew both of those things going in. Nor will knowing either of those things ruin the movie for you a whit - heck, Spacey tells you he's dead in the first three minutes of the film.

For approximately all of Act One of this movie - that is, approximately up to the point where Kevin Spacey begins lifting weights and asserting himself - I fidgeted in my seat. I covered my eyes and squeezed the bridge of my nose like I had a headache. If you ever see me do this at a movie, it means I find the characters either unpleasant, unsympathetic, painful to watch, or all of the above. In this case, not only were the characters thoroughly detestable and ill at ease with their drab, wretched lives, they were - as Thora Birch says of Kevin Spacey - "too embarrassing to live."

(Forgive me for using the names of the actors instead of the characters. I honestly cannot remember any of their names. It's not the kind of film where that's important.)

I nearly had to leave the theatre the first time Spacey is trying to talk to Mena Suvari's little sexpot character. I hate watching people make fools of themselves.

For a few panicky moments I thought the film was going to be entirely like that - exactly the film I had been dreading. Ah, but this is all setup. You have to hate the characters first, so that when they change you can learn to love them.

People have been making a lot of noise about how this is a film about the marginalization and emasculation of the American male, a story about how one man breaks out of that vise and puts some joy back into his life - how he gets himself empowered, if you'll pardon the phrase.

It is - but to call it that is to take too narrow a focus. This is a film about marginalization of everybody. All three of the members of this dysfunctional little family - Spacey, Birch, Annette Bening - are trapped in their own little ruts, and they all find ways to break out of them. All three of them find ways to get empowered, not just Spacey.

And that brings me to my first of two complaints about the film. Why is it necessary for the methods of empowerment to be such external crutches ... and worse yet, to paint them as evil things to be atoned for later? Why is it that the only time we see Bening actually looking happy in this film is when she's either drunk and planning to commit adultery, or actually committing it? Why is pot necessary to Spacey's rehabilitation? For that matter, why is his tawdry little Mena Suvari fantasy necessary? (The latter is both the most touted aspect of the film and the least interesting.) Couldn't he just one day see the light on his own?

It's as if the writers are saying that none of these people are strong enough to break out on their own, that they need these props to do it. As someone who is so strongly in favor of self-help that I go so far as to distrust psychiatry, this message rankles.

Then - having forced these props upon their characters - the writers feel it is necessary to make the poor characters atone for their imaginary sins.

My second complaint about the film is one I had even before seeing it: I do not understand, from a script perspective, why it is necessary for Kevin Spacey to die.

He hasn't done anything wrong. He's demanded and gotten a few things he has long been entitled to, things he should have already been getting. He's a little rough on Bening, you say? Well, she's hell on wheels and deserves it. (I know, I know, she's got problems of her own. We'll come to that in a moment.) He realizes he's about to make a big mistake before he actually does anything with Suvari. He finally gets back his lost mojo, and becomes a good, happy, well-adjusted guy, at peace with the world. And the moment he achieves this satori, he gets shot in the back of the head.

Did I mention I like my movies to have upbeat messages? I didn't get one of those here.

By doing this, the writers say: Modern life grinds us all down until we become nasty dehumanized blobs. Anyone who tries to escape, tries to show some color, is severely punished.

I may need to watch Pleasantville or The Truman Show a few times in order to counteract this. Of course, I've heard people say that the happy endings of both those films are too unbelievable to swallow, even in their contexts - which brings me to the comment that Nonelvis made at dinner afterward:

"Well, how would you have ended it?"

It's true - nothing else works in context. I'd have liked to see Bening almost shoot him and then have the two of them mend their fences - but given the setup, I think the viewers would cry "Foul!" ... and given the way Bening's character is drawn, I don't think I'd wish that on Spacey's character at that point. He has redeemed himself; Birch's character has redeemed herself; Bening's has not, and it doesn't look like she ever will.

Which brings me to the last major philosophical point I had: Some people, I'm told, are raising the cry that this is a misogynist movie.

Why do they think that? Just because, of the film's three significant females, one believes she has to act like a slut to get noticed by others, one believes she has to act like a harridan to get noticed, and the third, who would rather not be a slut or a b**ch, has therefore resigned herself to never being noticed?

That's not misogynist, folks. Unfortunately, it's realistic. The body-image woes, roleplay issues, and other problems these women have are way too typical of what it means to be female in this country today. If anything I would hope that more men with teenage daughters would watch the way they're painted here and say: My god, I never realized it was that bad.

(Digression: While we were in Baton Rouge we played a few rounds of miniature golf. Ahead of us on one course were a group of young high-schoolers, dressed to the nines - perhaps they'd been at a party or something. All of the girls in the group were so thin that I believe I could have encircled their waists in my two hands. This is not normal. Normal is no longer normal. Maybe that's the real message of this film.)

One of the reasons we saw the film is so that we can combine it with other popular culture - notably Fight Club and Susan Faludi's book Stiffed - and write a mouth organ column about whether men really are being marginalized, or whether it's just hooey. You can see which way I lean. Men probably are being marginalized. Poor sad men! Meanwhile women are still fighting to be treated like humans in the first place.

All that said - and as consistent as it may have been with the movie's aims - I wish they had allowed Bening to be sympathetic, for us to see more of her horrors than just the one scene where she breaks down in the empty house.

Okay, but enough of the Higher Theory. A few random notes:

Kevin Spacey is a god - even if the rest of this film were utter garbage, which it ain't, he probably could have saved it by himself, armed only with his flawless delivery.

I found the interactions between Thora Birch and The Boy Next Door With The Eyebrows And Odd Untraceable Accent to be the most interesting subplot of the film. Her friend Suvari is a bad piece of work, shallow and fickle, and he knows it immediately. He likes Birch because she's not like Suvari - she is her own self. Eventually, Birch figures that out, and it's a wonder to watch her confidence slowly increase. The sequence where Eyebrow Boy tells Suvari off is great. All his sequences are great. I wish I could remember the actor's name.

In fact, this film is consistently at its best during scenes where actors are in confrontation - the asparagus scene, the drive-through window ("You are so busted!"), Eyebrow Boy's dad beating him, and so forth.

Allison Janney wasn't given a lot to do in this film, was she? Nonelvis had a problem with that character - she felt the film should have done more to explain why this woman was so catatonic. I say not. I accepted the shorthand. When a film asks you to get inside the heads of four or five major characters, you don't have time to waste with the supporting cast. Just pencil them in and let the audience assume.

Ultimately, it's a good film. In fact, it's a very good film.

It's just not a very cheerful one.

Now that you've seen the way I spew when I actually have seen a movie and have some Deep Thoughts about it, you probably all wish I'd stick to just making snide comments about the ones I haven't seen.

Well, I could have told you that.

Oh, yes - and I correctly predicted who would pull the trigger. For what that's worth. After all, this isn't a murder mystery.

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