A Sam Mendes film
Starring: Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, Thora Birch
Drama/comedy

American Beauty shapes up as one of the edgiest movies of the year. Part of its appeal is a bracing, ice-cold comedic intelligence that takes a more sardonic survey of the American scene than we may be ready for in a mainstream release. At the same time, there are shticks, situations, even characters, so satirically self-contained that they seem like facile targets. But just when the movie has begun to seem glib, we realize that it isn't pushing parody — it's demonstrating that entire aspects of our lives have long since been given over to values so crass and aspirations so debased that parody has ceased to be a meaningful gambit. The main thing is to survive.

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) lives in a picture-perfect planned community in the new heartland and works for an advertising magazine. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), sells real estate and works at it like a woman possessed. Their daughter Jane (Thora Birch), still in high school, chiefly works at finding new ways to feel contempt for both of them.

American Beauty is a kind of rose. It also refers, more or less officially, to Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), the local blond bombshell on the high school cheerleading squad who fills Jane's ear with tales of her sexual conquests, and captures Lester's imagination just at the point when it's lost touch with anything else. But although Angela looms large in the film's legend and plays a central part in its unexpectedly tender climax, the meaning of the title reaches beyond her. We get closer to it in a brilliant scene when Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), the new boy-next-door with the unnerving habit of videotaping absolutely everything — but especially Jane — shows her his favorite image: an empty, castaway plastic bag being inflated and emptied, buoyed up and flattened, brought eerily to life and then dropped by the autumn wind. At once everyday and ethereal, that damned plastic bag and its unlikely moment of beauty is going to haunt and gladden the memory of anyone who sees this film.

That the film also ends up being haunting and gladdening is due largely to the extraordinary Kevin Spacey. His Lester is a self-declared "loser," a walking dead man living out the last year of his life — something the movie announces straight off and then contrives to have us forget about till it's good and ready. Spacey gets so many shadings of absurdity, haplessness, self-disgust, wry amusement, distraction, and insouciance into the character that Lester becomes an epic American hero — a suburban Willy Loman without the sample case or (thank God) the sententiousness. After such an edgy film, he leaves us with the gift, the utterly unanticipated gift, of serenity.

Rated R