American Beauty (film)

American Beauty
Directed by Sam Mendes
Produced by Bruce Cohen
Dan Jinks
Written by Alan Ball
Starring Kevin Spacey
Annette Bening
Thora Birch
Wes Bentley
Mena Suvari
Chris Cooper
Peter Gallagher
Allison Janney
Music by Thomas Newman
Cinematography Conrad L. Hall
Editing by Tariq Anwar
Christopher Greenbury
Distributed by DreamWorks
Release date(s) Flag of the United States September 8, 1999 (première)
Flag of the United States September 15, 1999 (limited release)
Flag of the United States October 1, 1999 (wide release)
Flag of the United Kingdom February 4, 2000 (wide release)
Flag of Australia February 4, 2000 (wide release)
Running time 122 min.
Country Flag of the United States.svg United States
Language English
Budget $15,000,000 (estimated)[1]
Gross revenue $356,296,601

American Beauty is a 1999 drama film set in modern American suburbia. Starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, it was the feature film debut for writer Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes. A massive success both critically and commercially, all four were nominated for Academy Awards, and the film won a total of five including Best Picture.

Contents

Plot

Lester Burnham (Spacey) is a 42-year-old father and advertising executive who serves as the film's narrator. "I'm 42 years old; in less than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet. And in a way, I'm dead already." Lester's family life is messy – his wife Carolyn (Bening) is an ambitious realtor who feels that she is unsuccessful at fulfilling her potential, and his 16-year-old daughter Jane (Birch) is unhappy and struggling with self-esteem issues. Lester himself is a self-described loser: boring, faceless and easy to forget. Lester is reinvigorated, however, when he meets Jane's friend and classmate Angela Hayes (Suvari) at a high school basketball game. Lester immediately develops an obvious infatuation with Angela, much to his daughter's embarrassment. Throughout the film, Lester has fantasies involving a sexually aggressive Angela and red rose petals. The Burnhams' new neighbors are Col. Frank Fitts, USMC (Cooper), his distracted wife Barbara (Janney), and his camcorder-obsessed son Ricky (Bentley). When confronted with the gay couple living two doors down, Col. Fitts reacts with homophobic disgust.

Over the course of a few days, each of the Burnhams individually makes a life-changing choice. Carolyn meets real estate rival Buddy Kane for a business lunch and ends up beginning an affair with him, and later takes up gun lessons. Seconds away from being downsized, Lester defiantly blackmails his boss for $60,000, quits his job, and takes up low-pressure employment as a burger-flipper at a fast food chain. He continues to liberate himself by trading in his Toyota Camry for his dream car, a 1970 Pontiac Firebird, starts running and working out to "look good naked" and to have a body that will impress Angela, and starts smoking a genetically enhanced form of the marijuana he enjoyed in his youth. Jane grows increasingly disillusioned with and distant from Angela, allowing herself to develop a romantic relationship with Ricky. Ricky and Jane bond over what he considers to be the most beautiful camcorder footage he has ever filmed, that of a plastic grocery bag dancing in the wind; meanwhile, Ricky also quickly befriends Lester and secretly acts as his weed supplier.

Col. Fitts, concerned over the growing relationship between Lester and Ricky, roots through his son's possessions, finding footage of Lester working out in the nude (captured by chance while Ricky was filming Jane through her bedroom window)- slowly bringing him to the conclusion that his son is gay. Buddy and Carolyn are found out by Lester, who seems to be completely unfazed by his wife's infidelity. Carolyn, who is almost more devastated by Lester's indifference than by her being exposed as an adulteress, is further dismayed when Buddy reacts by breaking off the affair. As evening falls, Ricky returns home to find his father waiting for him with fists and vitriol, having mistaken his drug rendezvous with Lester for a sexual affair. Realising this as an opportunity for freedom, Ricky falsely agrees that he is gay and goads his father until Col. Fitts throws him out. Ricky rushes to Jane's house and asks her to flee with him to New York City - something she agrees to, much to the dismay of Angela, who quickly protests. Ricky shoots her down with her deepest fear: that she is boring and completely ordinary. Devastated, Angela storms out of the room, leaving Jane and Ricky to one another permanently.

An emotionally fragile Col. Fitts approaches Lester's garage/workout room in the pouring rain, and Lester is concerned and attempts to comfort him, but is taken by surprise when Fitts kisses him. Moments later, Lester finds a distraught Angela, and the two of them prove to be in the appropriate mental spaces to be on the verge of sexual intercourse. The seduction, while powerful, is derailed when she confesses that she is a virgin. Now viewing her only as an innocent child, Lester immediately withdraws, his affections shifting to that of a father-figure, and they bond over their shared frustrations with and concern for Jane. Lester asks "How's her life?" and is pleased when Angela says that Jane's in love. When Angela then asks how Lester is, he realizes, to his own surprise, that he feels great. A happy Lester sits at the table looking at a photograph of his family in happier times, as Angela is at the toilet, unaware of the gun being slowly led into the camera frame and pressed to the back of his head. A gunshot is heard, then, and blood splatters the kitchen wall.

In his final narration, Lester looks back on the events of his life, intertwined with images of everyone's reactions to the sound of the subsequential gunshot, including one of a bloody and shaken Col. Fitts with a gun missing from his collection. Despite his death, Lester, from his vantage point as narrator, is content:

"I guess I could be really pissed off about what happened to me...but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain. And I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry. You will someday."

Cast

Production

Alan Ball originally wrote American Beauty for the stage. He saw a paper bag floating in the wind near the World Trade Center plaza and was inspired by it to write the film.[2]

Many of the school scenes were shot at South High School in Torrance, California, and most of the extras in the gym crowd were South High students. Sam Mendes designed the two girls' appearances to change over the course of the film, with Thora Birch gradually using less makeup and Suvari gradually using more, to emphasize their shifting perceptions of themselves.

Singer and dancer Paula Abdul choreographed the cheerleading scene.[3]

Originally, the role of Lester Burnham was offered to Chevy Chase, but he turned it down.

During the movie's second dinner scene, Spacey was only supposed to throw the plate of asparagus onto the floor. However, while shooting, Spacey improvised and pitched it at the wall, bringing about genuine reactions of shock to Bening and Birch's faces.

Deleted plotlines

According to Cooper, much of Col. Fitts' backstory was eliminated from the final script, in which Fitts is a closeted homosexual who lost his male lover during the Vietnam War.[4]

Ball's original screenplay had opening and ending scenes in which Col. Fitts frames Jane and Ricky for Lester's murder. They go to jail, but Col. Fitts' wife finds his bloody shirt. After shooting these scenes, Mendes removed many of them for the first cut, feeling that they made the film lose its mystery.[5] Although Ball and Mendes initially disagreed, Ball accepted the new version after Mendes made further cuts to that part of the plot, which "worked on the page but not really on screen."[6] In the DVD commentary, Mendes refers to deleted scenes for the viewer to find on the disc. However, these scenes are not on the DVD as he had changed his mind after recording the commentary.[7]

Soundtrack and score

Main articles: American Beauty (soundtrack) and American Beauty: Original Motion Picture Score

The score to American Beauty was composed by Thomas Newman, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. The soundtrack features songs by artists such as The Who, Free, Eels, The Guess Who, The Folk Implosion, Gomez, and Bob Dylan, as well as a cover version of The Beatles "Because" performed by Elliott Smith. The film also features "Don't Let It Bring You Down" performed by Annie Lennox, though this was not included on the soundtrack.

The Original Motion Picture Score was later released on January 11, 2000. This contains 19 tracks composed by Thomas Newman for the film.

The score was sampled in the 2000 dance track "American Dream" by Jakatta.

Reception

Three months before the film's opening, New York Times reviewer Bernard Weinraub described it as "the most talked about film of the moment." His column, which ran on the weekend of July 4, gave few specifics regarding the film but noted that it was generating "tremendous buzz" in the DreamWorks studio, as the details of how and when the movie would be released were debated; it also reported that Steven Spielberg (a co-founder of DreamWorks) called the film one of the best he had seen in years and that Bening was moved to tears at an early screening.[8][9]

The movie premiered on September 8, 1999, in Los Angeles, California, to reviews that generally reaffirmed the advance hype, uniformly praising the cast, script, and cinematography, as well as the first-time direction by Mendes. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Guthman called it "a dazzling tale of loneliness, desire and the hollowness of conformity." Jay Carr for the Boston Globe called the film "a millennial classic"; the New York Post called it "a flat-out masterpiece." Among the smaller number of critics who expressed negative opinions of the film were J. Hoberman of the Village Voice and Wesley Morris of the San Francisco Examiner, both of whom were critical of the film's script and direction, if not its performances.[10] Filmmaker Robert Altman hated the film.[11]

On September 11, it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People's Choice award just days before its opening. Aided tremendously by the positive press, the film took in $861,531 on its opening weekend in the United States, despite a limited release to only 16 screens. By October, the film was released to a wider audience, and quickly surpassed the film's estimated $15,000,000 production budget. After its total theatre count steadily dropped near the end of 1999 and the start of 2000, it was given a wider relaunch after it received several Academy Award nominations. Ultimately, the film would gross $356,296,601 internationally.[1]

Scenes from the Los Angeles and Toronto premieres, as well as other unique footage related to American Beauty, are featured in the 2008 documentary My Big Break, directed by T.W. Zierra, which follows Wes Bentley before and after he landed his breakout role as Ricky Fitts.

Overall, the film was well-received by critics, with an 89% "Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

Awards

The film dominated the 72nd Academy Awards ceremony, with a total of eight nominations and five wins. It also had another 82 wins and 63 nominations at numerous other award ceremonies.

Wins

Nominations

In popular culture

Later in the song Ricky's proposition to Jane from earlier in the same scene is also played:

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Business data for American Beauty from IMDb
  2. ↑ Statement made during Alan Ball's Oscar acceptance speech.
  3. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169547/trivia IMDB trivia page for American Beauty
  4. ↑ Alex Beam (2000-03-24). "Beauty displays Hollywood's new cliches" (fee required), Boston Globe. Retrieved on 2008-02-25. "The original script had a scene in which Colonel Fitts watched his male lover die in Vietnam." 
  5. ↑ "'Beauty' mark: DVD due with 3 hours of extras" (fee required), The Hollywood Reporter (2000-07-07). Retrieved on 2008-02-23. 
  6. ↑ Josh Wolk (2000-03-27). "Pitching Fitts", Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved on 2008-04-01. 
  7. ↑ Vern Perry (2000-10-30). "These discs go to extremes", The Orange County Register. Retrieved on 2008-02-23. 
  8. ↑ Sragow, Michael (2000-03-30). "American BJ" (in English), Salon.com. Retrieved on 2006-07-16. 
  9. ↑ Weinraub, Bernard (1999-07-02). "At the Movies", The New York Times. Retrieved on 2006-07-05. 
  10. ↑ Hoberman, J.. "Boomer Bust", The Village Voice. Retrieved on 2006-07-05. 
  11. ↑ Roger Friedman (2002-03-23). "Altman: Titanic Worst Movie Ever", Fox News. Retrieved on 2008-12-02. 
  12. ↑ The Adam and Joe Show "American Beautoy"on YouTube

External links

Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Shakespeare in Love		 Academy Award for Best Picture
1999		 Succeeded by
Gladiator
BAFTA Award for Best Film
1999
Preceded by
Saving Private Ryan		 Golden Globe for Best Picture - Drama
1999
Films directed by Sam Mendes
American Beauty (1999) • Road to Perdition (2002) • Jarhead (2005) • Revolutionary Road (2008)
Academy Award for Best Picture

Chariots of Fire (1981) · Gandhi (1982) · Terms of Endearment (1983) · Amadeus (1984) · Out of Africa (1985) · Platoon (1986) · The Last Emperor (1987) · Rain Man (1988) · Driving Miss Daisy (1989) · Dances with Wolves (1990) · The Silence of the Lambs (1991) · Unforgiven (1992) · Schindler's List (1993) · Forrest Gump (1994) · Braveheart (1995) · The English Patient (1996) · Titanic (1997) · Shakespeare in Love (1998) · American Beauty (1999) · Gladiator (2000)

Complete List · (1928–1940) · (1941–1960) · (1961–1980) · (1981–2000) · (2001–present)