![\"There](\"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ambeauty21.jpg\" "\\"ambeauty2\\"")
There are only two compelling reasons to watch "American Beauty," and Thora Birch has both of them<\/p><\/div>\n
Look Closer: Hectoring, Moralizing, Stridency<\/span><\/em><\/h1>\n[xrr rating=2.5\/5]<\/span><\/p>\nAmerican Beauty<\/em><\/strong>. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scott Bakula, Sam Roberts, and Barry Del Sherman.\u00a0 Screenplay by Alan Ball. Directed by Sam Mendes. (Dreamworks SKG, Color, 122 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nAmerican Beauty<\/em> opens and closes with Kevin Spacey\u2019s narration from the grave, an idea lifted from Billy Wilder\u2019s 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard<\/em>. (The producers and leads make sure to drop Billy Wilder’s name every other sentence or so during media interviews, just to subtly drive that point home).<\/p>\nSimilarities end there. The caustic and brilliant cynicism of Wilder\u2019s and Charles Brackett\u2019s last screen collaboration has been replaced by Alan Ball\u2019s pose<\/em> of same. When it came out a couple months ago, there was a lot of talk about how \u201ccourageous\u201d this movie\u2019s producers were. I saw no courage in it, but merely a clich\u00e9d portrait of suburbia.<\/p>\nSuburbia as a soul-draining no man\u2019s land is nothing new in Hollywood. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit<\/em> (1955), explored similar themes, and Gregory Peck even shared the same (by-now hackneyed) profession\u2014advertising man\u2014as Kevin Spacey\u2019s anti-hero, Lester Burnham (this surname is another filch from the Wilder Oeuvre<\/em>, from the dipsomaniacal The Lost Weekend<\/em>). In Flannel<\/em>, Peck puts his job on the line to maintain his integrity, and end up winning. Spacey\u2019s \u201cmodernized\u201d rat boosts his severance package by blackmailing his firm\u2019s \u201cefficiency expert,\u201d and then uses the proceeds to forever chuck his responsibilities.<\/p>\nThe movie\u2019s premise, that Spacey has (unbeknownst to him) just a year to live shows him in the throes of a mid-life crisis in which we find him \u201cliving each day as if it were my last.\u201d So, does he go and write the great American novel? Does he reinvigorate his neglected family life? No; he quits his dead-end job to work at a fast food joint (obviously, a much more fulfilling career), exercises, buys a red Firebird (wow! That\u2019s a new one on me!) and lusts after his teenage daughter\u2019s best friend (Mena Suvari). Whereas Wilder and Brackett conjured memorable flesh-and-blood characters from the printed page, Beauty<\/em> scenarist Ball has a reverse-alchemy going on: Despite lots of gratuitous flesh, the characters come off as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts.<\/p>\nThere was a saying in the dramatic world, \u201cthe play\u2019s the thing.\u201d Now, \u201cthe agenda\u2019s the thing.\u201d All the characters in this movie aren\u2019t really characters at all, but representations<\/em>, stand-ins for various social and political agendas.<\/p>\nAmerican Beauty<\/em> is marketed with the slogan \u201cLook Closer.\u201d \u201cLook closer,\u201d you\u2019ll see that the gay couple (Scott Bakula and Sam Robards) across the street is just like you and me; the \u201cmacho,\u201d homophobic, Marine (Chris Cooper) is really a repressed homosexual (who didn’t see that coming a mile away?). The \u201cweird\u201d drug-dealing peeping-Tom (Wes Bentley) is really a well of philosophical profundity, rivaling Gandhi in depth and Mother Teresa in altruistic impulse. The \u201cpopular\u201d cheerleader (Suvari) is actually this shy, lonely virgin (yeah, right), and the chiseled-chin real estate guy (Peter Gallagher) is your typical Hollywood capitalist\u2014shallow, ruthless, a philanderer and (big surprise) a gun nut. No matter how much I \u201clooked closer,\u201d I couldn\u2019t see any real people, or even idealized people that used to populate Hollywood fare. Instead, I kept seeing this P.C. playbook, written by some narcissistic baby-boomer who demands people view his movie with an open mind, but who himself sees life with blinders on.<\/p>\nAs character studies, Lester and his wife Carolyn (played by Annette Bening) ain\u2019t Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond. In Sunset Boulevard<\/em>, William Holden and Gloria Swanson weren\u2019t exactly people you\u2019d want in your living room, but you\u2019d certainly go to the Bijou to study them night after night. Their disturbing relationship was larger-than-life human nature at its darkest and most melodramatic. With American Beauty<\/em>, it\u2019s the people that have gotten small.<\/p>\nOccasionally, I actually sympathize with Lester, especially when he\u2019s being sarcastic to his wife. But all-in-all, the characterizations are just laughable at best: In one scene, Annette Bening becomes a \u201cgun-nut\u201d and goes to the shooting range to work out her frustrations. She manages to get tight shot groups despite her rising arms, twisted, manic, facial expression and heavy breathing while shooting. It\u2019s a scene that could only have been written by an anti-gun activist with an axe to grind. Real sportsmen at firing ranges know they can\u2019t shoot well unless they\u2019re calm and collected.<\/p>\n
But that would contradict the moviemakers\u2019 agenda. Likewise with the homosexual couple: They\u2019re merely props for Mendes\u2019 and Ball\u2019s politics. Out of all the main characters in the movie, they have the least screen time (only about 2-3 minutes total), and are only in the script to represent \u201cnormality.\u201d With all the talk the P.C. crowd devotes to the \u201ctrivialization\u201d and \u201cothering\u201d of \u201cmarginalized peoples,\u201d you\u2019d think someone would\u2019ve complained about how trivial these gay characters were. Aside from idly chatting with neighbors, delivering flowers to new arrivals on the block and jogging, the viewer knows nothing about them. But, since Jim and Jim weren\u2019t written to be interesting beyond their function as poster children, Ball and Mendes didn\u2019t see the need to.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, \u201clook closer\u201d is a great marketing gimmick, because upon looking closer, the viewer is left as bereft of any inspiration or entertainment as upon entering. It\u2019s is a new spin on an old Grimm brothers fable, \u201cThe Emperor’s New Clothes\u201d: If you<\/em> can’t understand it, then it must<\/em> be deep. If you don’t agree with Mendes\u2019 and Ball\u2019s worldview, then you<\/em> must be a social regressive. If you don’t think suburban life is as bad as they paint it, then you’re<\/em> not looking \u201cclosely\u201d enough, and, if upon looking closer, you find it shallow and vapid, then you<\/em> lack depth.<\/p>\nIn reality, it\u2019s Ball and Mendes who lack depth: You can\u2019t have your cynical cake and eat your sugarcoated agenda, too. Proof lies in another movie released later this year, Election<\/em>, by writer and director Alexander Payne, which explored identical<\/em> themes as this movie. However, they\u2019re really worlds apart: Election<\/em> bristles with real cynicism, and Payne presents people like you\u2019ve actually known in your lifetime, letting you bask in their hilarious pettiness, bitterness, sadness, euphoria, and delusions of grandeur. Payne actually gets to the heart of what motivates them in a panoply of human nature. Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon play internally<\/em> motivated people, and thus come off as believable characters, complete in themselves. The cast of American Beauty<\/em>\u00a0are merely crude marionettes dancing on the strings manipulated by an all-thumbs screenwriter and director.<\/p>\nLook closer. There ain\u2019t nothing there.<\/p>\n
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 Look Closer: Hectoring, Moralizing, Stridency [xrr rating=2.5\/5] American Beauty. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scott Bakula, Sam Roberts, and Barry Del Sherman.\u00a0 Screenplay by Alan Ball. Directed by Sam Mendes. (Dreamworks SKG, Color, 122 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)\u00a0 American Beauty opens and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,38,35,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-comedies","category-comedies","category-dramas","category-mreview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":196,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
American Beauty<\/em><\/strong>. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scott Bakula, Sam Roberts, and Barry Del Sherman.\u00a0 Screenplay by Alan Ball. Directed by Sam Mendes. (Dreamworks SKG, Color, 122 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n American Beauty<\/em> opens and closes with Kevin Spacey\u2019s narration from the grave, an idea lifted from Billy Wilder\u2019s 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard<\/em>. (The producers and leads make sure to drop Billy Wilder’s name every other sentence or so during media interviews, just to subtly drive that point home).<\/p>\n Similarities end there. The caustic and brilliant cynicism of Wilder\u2019s and Charles Brackett\u2019s last screen collaboration has been replaced by Alan Ball\u2019s pose<\/em> of same. When it came out a couple months ago, there was a lot of talk about how \u201ccourageous\u201d this movie\u2019s producers were. I saw no courage in it, but merely a clich\u00e9d portrait of suburbia.<\/p>\n Suburbia as a soul-draining no man\u2019s land is nothing new in Hollywood. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit<\/em> (1955), explored similar themes, and Gregory Peck even shared the same (by-now hackneyed) profession\u2014advertising man\u2014as Kevin Spacey\u2019s anti-hero, Lester Burnham (this surname is another filch from the Wilder Oeuvre<\/em>, from the dipsomaniacal The Lost Weekend<\/em>). In Flannel<\/em>, Peck puts his job on the line to maintain his integrity, and end up winning. Spacey\u2019s \u201cmodernized\u201d rat boosts his severance package by blackmailing his firm\u2019s \u201cefficiency expert,\u201d and then uses the proceeds to forever chuck his responsibilities.<\/p>\n The movie\u2019s premise, that Spacey has (unbeknownst to him) just a year to live shows him in the throes of a mid-life crisis in which we find him \u201cliving each day as if it were my last.\u201d So, does he go and write the great American novel? Does he reinvigorate his neglected family life? No; he quits his dead-end job to work at a fast food joint (obviously, a much more fulfilling career), exercises, buys a red Firebird (wow! That\u2019s a new one on me!) and lusts after his teenage daughter\u2019s best friend (Mena Suvari). Whereas Wilder and Brackett conjured memorable flesh-and-blood characters from the printed page, Beauty<\/em> scenarist Ball has a reverse-alchemy going on: Despite lots of gratuitous flesh, the characters come off as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts.<\/p>\n There was a saying in the dramatic world, \u201cthe play\u2019s the thing.\u201d Now, \u201cthe agenda\u2019s the thing.\u201d All the characters in this movie aren\u2019t really characters at all, but representations<\/em>, stand-ins for various social and political agendas.<\/p>\n American Beauty<\/em> is marketed with the slogan \u201cLook Closer.\u201d \u201cLook closer,\u201d you\u2019ll see that the gay couple (Scott Bakula and Sam Robards) across the street is just like you and me; the \u201cmacho,\u201d homophobic, Marine (Chris Cooper) is really a repressed homosexual (who didn’t see that coming a mile away?). The \u201cweird\u201d drug-dealing peeping-Tom (Wes Bentley) is really a well of philosophical profundity, rivaling Gandhi in depth and Mother Teresa in altruistic impulse. The \u201cpopular\u201d cheerleader (Suvari) is actually this shy, lonely virgin (yeah, right), and the chiseled-chin real estate guy (Peter Gallagher) is your typical Hollywood capitalist\u2014shallow, ruthless, a philanderer and (big surprise) a gun nut. No matter how much I \u201clooked closer,\u201d I couldn\u2019t see any real people, or even idealized people that used to populate Hollywood fare. Instead, I kept seeing this P.C. playbook, written by some narcissistic baby-boomer who demands people view his movie with an open mind, but who himself sees life with blinders on.<\/p>\n As character studies, Lester and his wife Carolyn (played by Annette Bening) ain\u2019t Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond. In Sunset Boulevard<\/em>, William Holden and Gloria Swanson weren\u2019t exactly people you\u2019d want in your living room, but you\u2019d certainly go to the Bijou to study them night after night. Their disturbing relationship was larger-than-life human nature at its darkest and most melodramatic. With American Beauty<\/em>, it\u2019s the people that have gotten small.<\/p>\n Occasionally, I actually sympathize with Lester, especially when he\u2019s being sarcastic to his wife. But all-in-all, the characterizations are just laughable at best: In one scene, Annette Bening becomes a \u201cgun-nut\u201d and goes to the shooting range to work out her frustrations. She manages to get tight shot groups despite her rising arms, twisted, manic, facial expression and heavy breathing while shooting. It\u2019s a scene that could only have been written by an anti-gun activist with an axe to grind. Real sportsmen at firing ranges know they can\u2019t shoot well unless they\u2019re calm and collected.<\/p>\n But that would contradict the moviemakers\u2019 agenda. Likewise with the homosexual couple: They\u2019re merely props for Mendes\u2019 and Ball\u2019s politics. Out of all the main characters in the movie, they have the least screen time (only about 2-3 minutes total), and are only in the script to represent \u201cnormality.\u201d With all the talk the P.C. crowd devotes to the \u201ctrivialization\u201d and \u201cothering\u201d of \u201cmarginalized peoples,\u201d you\u2019d think someone would\u2019ve complained about how trivial these gay characters were. Aside from idly chatting with neighbors, delivering flowers to new arrivals on the block and jogging, the viewer knows nothing about them. But, since Jim and Jim weren\u2019t written to be interesting beyond their function as poster children, Ball and Mendes didn\u2019t see the need to.<\/p>\n Ultimately, \u201clook closer\u201d is a great marketing gimmick, because upon looking closer, the viewer is left as bereft of any inspiration or entertainment as upon entering. It\u2019s is a new spin on an old Grimm brothers fable, \u201cThe Emperor’s New Clothes\u201d: If you<\/em> can’t understand it, then it must<\/em> be deep. If you don’t agree with Mendes\u2019 and Ball\u2019s worldview, then you<\/em> must be a social regressive. If you don’t think suburban life is as bad as they paint it, then you’re<\/em> not looking \u201cclosely\u201d enough, and, if upon looking closer, you find it shallow and vapid, then you<\/em> lack depth.<\/p>\n In reality, it\u2019s Ball and Mendes who lack depth: You can\u2019t have your cynical cake and eat your sugarcoated agenda, too. Proof lies in another movie released later this year, Election<\/em>, by writer and director Alexander Payne, which explored identical<\/em> themes as this movie. However, they\u2019re really worlds apart: Election<\/em> bristles with real cynicism, and Payne presents people like you\u2019ve actually known in your lifetime, letting you bask in their hilarious pettiness, bitterness, sadness, euphoria, and delusions of grandeur. Payne actually gets to the heart of what motivates them in a panoply of human nature. Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon play internally<\/em> motivated people, and thus come off as believable characters, complete in themselves. The cast of American Beauty<\/em>\u00a0are merely crude marionettes dancing on the strings manipulated by an all-thumbs screenwriter and director.<\/p>\n Look closer. There ain\u2019t nothing there.<\/p>\n Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Look Closer: Hectoring, Moralizing, Stridency [xrr rating=2.5\/5] American Beauty. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scott Bakula, Sam Roberts, and Barry Del Sherman.\u00a0 Screenplay by Alan Ball. Directed by Sam Mendes. (Dreamworks SKG, Color, 122 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)\u00a0 American Beauty opens and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,38,35,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-comedies","category-comedies","category-dramas","category-mreview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":196,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}