Sam Mendes had never directed a feature film before American Beauty. DreamWorks executives wanted Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner or John Travolta for the lead. Mendes wanted Kevin Spacey. The studio lost that argument, and the movie that resulted won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
A Fry Cook and a 1970 Pontiac Firebird
American Beauty is a 1999 black comedy and psychological drama written by Alan Ball. It runs 122 minutes. Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a middle-aged advertising executive in suburbia who hates his job and his marriage. His wife Carolyn, played by Annette Bening, is materialistic and status-obsessed. Their 16-year-old daughter Jane, played by Thora Birch, resents them both and has low self-esteem.
The plot turns on an infatuation. At a school basketball game, during a cheerleading routine, Lester notices Jane’s best friend Angela Hayes, played by Mena Suvari. Angela brags to classmates about being sexually experienced. Lester begins having sexual fantasies about her, with red rose petals as a recurring motif. He overhears Angela teasing Jane that she would have sex with him if he improved his physique. He starts exercising. He quits his job, blackmails his supervisor into a generous severance package, buys a 1970 Pontiac Firebird, and takes work as a fry cook at a fast food restaurant.
Carolyn, meanwhile, starts an affair with married real estate “King” Buddy Kane, played by Peter Gallagher. Lester begins smoking marijuana supplied by the teenager next door.
Ricky Fitts and the Camcorder
That neighbor is Ricky Fitts, played by Wes Bentley. He moves in with his father Frank, a retired Marine colonel played by Chris Cooper; his near-catatonic mother Barbara, played by Allison Janney; and a camcorder. Ricky documents the world around him, collecting recordings on videotape in his bedroom. He finds beauty in unexpected places. He pays for supplies by dealing marijuana, using part-time catering and waitstaff jobs as a front.
Frank is a strict and abusive disciplinarian. He previously had Ricky sent to a psychiatric hospital and military school. He is homophobic, and the gay couple next door — Jim Olmeyer and Jim Berkley, played by Scott Bakula and Sam Robards — anger him by welcoming the Fitts family.
Jane starts a relationship with Ricky. Angela thinks he is strange. The girls’ friendship wanes as Angela and Lester develop sexual interests in one another.
Spacey Was Not the Studio’s First Choice
The casting story is worth telling because it explains what the film gets right. Mendes had Spacey and Bening in mind from the beginning. DreamWorks suggested alternatives for Lester, including Willis, Costner and Travolta. The role was also offered to Chevy Chase, who turned it down. Helen Hunt or Holly Hunter were proposed for Carolyn. Mendes did not want a big star “weighing the film down.” He chose Spacey on the strength of The Usual Suspects and Seven, both 1995, and Glengarry Glen Ross from 1992.
Spacey was surprised by the offer. “I usually play characters who are very quick, very manipulative and smart,” he said. “I usually wade in dark, sort of treacherous waters. This is a man living one step at a time, playing by his instincts. This is actually much closer to me, to what I am, than those other parts.”
Mendes offered Bening the role without the studio’s consent. Executives were upset. By September 1998, DreamWorks had entered negotiations with both actors.
Spacey based Lester’s early “schlubby” deportment loosely on Walter Matthau. Lester’s physique improves over the film from flabby to toned. Spacey worked out during filming, but Mendes shot the scenes out of chronological order, so Spacey varied postures to portray the stages. Before filming, Mendes and Spacey studied Jack Lemmon in The Apartment (1960), because Mendes wanted Spacey to emulate “the way [Lemmon] moved, the way he looked, the way he was in that office and the way he was an ordinary man and yet a special man.”
The voiceover is a throwback to Sunset Boulevard (1950), which is also narrated in retrospect by a dead character.
A DreamWorks Campaign Built on a Snub
American Beauty opened in North America on September 15, 1999, through DreamWorks Pictures, and went wide on October 1. It drew widespread critical and popular acclaim. It was the second-best-reviewed American film of the year, behind Being John Malkovich.
It grossed over $350 million worldwide against a $15-million budget. That made it the ninth highest-grossing film of 1999.
DreamWorks launched a major campaign to boost the film’s Oscar chances after the controversy over Saving Private Ryan (1998), which lost Best Picture the previous year. At the 72nd Academy Awards, American Beauty won five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director for Mendes, Best Actor for Spacey, Best Original Screenplay for Ball, and Best Cinematography for Conrad L. Hall. It was nominated for and won many other awards, mainly for directing, writing and acting.
KEY FACTS BOX
- Release: September 15, 1999 (North America, DreamWorks Pictures); wide release October 1, 1999
- Runtime: 122 minutes
- Budget: $15 million
- Worldwide gross: over $350 million
- Rank: ninth highest-grossing film of 1999
- Oscars: 5 wins at the 72nd Academy Awards — Best Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay, Cinematography
- Metacritic: 84/100
- Clay Tribune score: 8.4/10
The Rose Petals Do the Work
Here is what holds up. The film’s central trick is that Lester is not the protagonist of his own fantasy. He is a man playing by his instincts, as Spacey put it, and the movie lets those instincts curdle. The rose petals are the tell. They appear in his fantasies as ornament, and ornament is exactly what his life has become — a house, a car, a job, a marriage, all surface. Ball’s script never lets Lester off the hook for wanting a teenager. That is a harder line than most films of this era took, and it is the reason the movie still has teeth.
The Fitts household is the other half of the argument. Frank’s abuse, Ricky’s camcorder, Barbara’s silence — this is what suburban order looks like when you stop pretending. Ricky finds beauty in unexpected places, and he is the only character who is not lying to himself. That is not a small thing. The film stacks Ricky against Lester deliberately, and the comparison is not flattering to Lester.
The supporting cast earns its keep. Cooper is genuinely frightening as Frank, and Janney does more with near-silence than most actors manage with pages of dialogue. Bentley plays Ricky with a calm that reads as either wisdom or damage, and the film is smart enough not to decide which.
Where the Film Slips
The weaknesses are real. Carolyn’s affair with Buddy Kane is the thinnest thread in the movie. Gallagher is fine, but the subplot plays as satire that has not aged as well as the rest. Bening is doing strong work in a role the script underserves — Carolyn is written as a type, and Bening has to build a person out of it. She mostly succeeds.
The voiceover is a debt the film never quite repays. Borrowing the dead-narrator device from Sunset Boulevard buys American Beauty a retrospection it does not need. Lester telling us what happened from beyond the grave softens the ending. The film would be sharper if it trusted us to watch him fail without a guide.
Mendes’ inexperience shows in a few places. The film is beautiful — Conrad L. Hall’s cinematography is the most confident element on screen — but the direction occasionally reaches for significance where the writing already delivered it. A first-time director with this script and this cast had a lot of room to be merely competent. Mendes was better than that, but the seams are visible.
What the Oscars Got Right
The five wins are defensible. Best Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay, Cinematography — that is a coherent set. Spacey’s win is the one worth arguing about, because Lester is a passive character for much of the runtime, and the performance is built on small adjustments rather than big scenes. It works. The Lemmon study pays off in the office scenes, where Lester moves like a man who has already left.
Ball’s screenplay is the film’s spine. It sets up a suburban satire and then refuses to let the satire be the point. The marijuana, the Firebird, the fry cook job — these are not rebellion. They are a middle-aged man’s costume changes, and Ball knows it.
What the Film Is Actually About
American Beauty is a film that was overpraised in 1999 and has since been overpunished. Both reactions miss what is actually on screen: a tightly written, well-acted drama about a man who mistakes his own boredom for an awakening. The DreamWorks campaign and the Saving Private Ryan snub are trivia now. The rose petals, Ricky’s camcorder, and Frank Fitts in the garage are not.
The film’s biggest liability is its reputation. It arrived as a statement about suburbia and got treated as one. It is smaller and stranger than that — a character study with a body count of one, and the body is the guy we spent two hours watching. That is a colder movie than its awards suggest, and a better one.
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