The intimidatingly-talented, Reznor-stalking Natasha Vargas-Cooper is in GQ this week talking about American Beauty’s retroactive badness, confirming a sentiment I’m familiar with: lots of shrewd alive-at-27 types no longer want to eat American Beauty’s rose petals. The piece is too good to edit, but principally Natasha finds the film’s panderism, faux raciness and brazen juvenilia not so best picture-y, in that or any other year.
Full disclosure: American Beauty is one of the movies of my life, so I’m both in Natasha’s nodal region and qualified to defend it., if not uniquely. I was twenty in 1999 and going Through It, like Winston the cat, and I was still too dumb or naive or Judeo-Christian to not believe all that Raymond Carver stuff about middle-aged people living in psychological oxygen tents, suffering like succotash. I admit I am still a sucker for corny overwritten malaise, which is not the only reason I stand by American Beauty. I just know that kind of thing is too true to be good, now.
Back then I had every reason to expect every secular family out there actually was riven with bickering and lust, and I wanted one of those! Also, Kevin Spacey still seemed both good and true.
And yes, I related to the self-made outlaw image of Lester Burnham, not learning until later that it’s an anagram for Humbert Learns. But after all I hadn’t been through in my life yet, it was just a movie.
Alan Ball’s writing, which is what everyone remembers, is an acquired taste and I rejoice to say I acquired it right away. I ate it up like a Judith Krantz novel.
Also, the directing. I was not way into theatre yet, but all the times I went back and rewatched American Beauty (twenty-six times, at last count) the difference between theatrical and stagy was defined for me, over & over. Sam Mendes gets demerited a lot by the snarkophiles over at Double Standard Junction (sometimes even his personal life takes a tune-up) but pressing a theatre-first agenda doesn’t have to make your movie Mametian, i.e. stiff and lifelike. Besides, cinematic techniques have infiltrated the stage for decades and Mendes, when he’s on (basically just American Beauty and Revolutionary Road) integrates with a croupier’s wit.
Mostly American Beauty’s overbright darkness resembles an oil-based paint that won’t dry, or a lost object by Elia Kazan or Tennessee Williams. It contains not a whit of satire; it’s original melodrama warmed up for the Clintonia afterparty. And its pot boileth over. The reason the galoot Spacey is such a hoot in it is because back then he was the best at running several programs at once, never overheating, never freezing, always attuned. He really was a dirty salesman and he, more than Ball or Mendes, sold whatever it was like it was going out of style. (It was).
But all these points are moot. There are movies we revisit because there is something left to learn, and American Beauty is not one of them. Increasingly, as in Natasha’s case, it’s one we go back to in order to look at what was wrong with us. But it also falls into the category of settled law, something that can’t or shouldn’t be relitigated. Antonin Scalia said it about Roe v. Wade and I’ve identified some classic movies, more or less at random, that qualify.
In reverse chronological order:
The King’s Speech
Schindler’s List
The Silence Of The Lambs
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Midnight Cowboy
The Graduate
Bonnie & Clyde
Splendor In The Grass/Cat On A Hot Tin Roof/A Streetcar Named Desire
A disambiguation of the category would be Great movies that were never allowed to be merely good. That’s not all of them, obv.—I left out a usual suspect, The English Patient, because it’s actually really really good, and included the two Kazans/one that basically is because of their similarity to American Beauty, and because the slickness they leave on the back of your brain is totally what I’m getting at.
Anymore when a movie enters the canon w/o proper vetting, grousy tweets ensue and we do our best to prevent it. But early in the InfoAge, everyone just did what they were told. None of the movies I mentioned are good, because they don’t have to be. (Because God had another plan for them.) American Beauty, regrettable as we now find our initial fancy for it, doesn’t owe us anything. It, like Christopher Hitchens and unlike God, is great. Whether or not it’s any good is something we shouldn’t hesitate to spill beer on.
