American Beauty

Just recently my husband and I have made a major move over five hundred miles, into a cute little suburban neighborhood.  All the houses are made of brick, with matching brick mailboxes.  We now have trees, a gas fireplace, and a dining room with a big window that begs to be slightly formal.  But where that room would like a polished new table with matching chairs, we have a pile of junk awaiting the attic.  Looking at it now, the hodgepodge of holiday decorations, plastic storage bins and old Lego buckets covered in stickers are a better example of our real personalities than any dressed up slab of wood could ever be.

I wonder how long any of our new neighbors kept unsightly things in plain view before replacing it with what is expected to be there.  I do believe that  we hide what is truly distinct about ourselves too often in parts of suburbia.  Neighbors can find community in the matching brick and then comfort in pleasing furniture, set in the appropriate places.  But too much of that can feel like a cage, and when these masks are discarded, what real personalities will we wish could go back to bland?

In American Beauty, middle-aged Lester (Kevin Spacey) has a beautiful house, a bullshit job, a wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening) who desperately appears to be perfect, a distant teenage daughter, Jane (Thora Birch) and less than a year to live.  Of course he doesn’t know that last part yet, but Lester already feels dead inside.

What awakens Lester from what he describes as a twenty year coma, is a sudden infatuation with his daughter’s friend, Angela (Mena Suvari).  She’s a blond beauty and knows it, always talking about the latest guy who has made her his sexual conquest.  Oh teenage girls and their need for male approval.  When she picks up on Lester’s attraction to her, she can’t help rub it into Jane’s face and act slightly flirtatious around her father.  And Lester can’t help but overhear how she thinks he would be more attractive if he worked out more.

Fueled by this rush of happiness and a goal to “look good naked,” Lester reinvents himself.  He starts working out and quits his office job to work at a burger joint, committing ballsy blackmail to keep supporting his family.  He starts smoking pot, bought from the kid next door, Ricky (Wes Bentley), who has a fascination with filming and starts dating his daughter.  Best of all, Lester no longer silently bows to to the conventional whims of his wife.  I found myself cheering Lester on from my couch the first time he tells Carolyn off.

Somehow, I had only liked Spacey in most of his other films, American Beauty is the first time I absolutely loved him.  He could have won that Oscar just for he way he runs down the hall after eavesdropping on Jane and Angela.  Spacey gracefully transforms Lester from a pathetic loser to a confidently happy person.  We don’t look down on him for smoking pot or lusting after a teenager, we envy how alive he feels.

While Lester blossoms after his perfectly boring suburbanite layers have been stripped away, we discover that others are rotten and ugly when revealed.  Along the way, we get small glimpses at how messed up Carolyn really is underneath her perfect shell.  She works as a realtor, desperately trying to make a ho-hum house appealing to buyers, who simply aren’t impressed.  At the end of the unsuccessful open house, she finds herself slipping into a weak moment and slaps herself, rather violently, saying, “Shut up, you’re weak, shut up!”  This is only the tip of Carolyn’s iceberg she represses from the world through perfectly manicured roses.

Throughout American Beauty, director Sam Mendes uses three distinct styles of filming at various times.  The first is very formal and sterile, reflecting the suburban lifestyle Carolyn is striving for.  Here, scenes are usually very centered, clean and uncluttered, but colors are a bit flat.  The second style is used primarily in Lester’s fantasies.  Here, there’s great contrast between lights and colors, especially the deep red rose pedals always present.  Many times there’s also a repetitive action, a moment that Lester focuses on, that seems to slow time down just before some climactic moment.  It helps us understand how Lester’s head is swimming whenever Angela is around.  The third style is the use of a simple handheld camera, usually in Ricky’s hand.  This serves as an unpolished, prying eye that sees things at face value.  While this lens shows the world without makeup or aid of fantasy, we are still able to see true beauty if you look close enough.

My pile-of-junk dining room would look marvelous on Ricky’s grainy camera.  It’s stayed this way for the past week simply because other things are more important, like writing this blog, packing for a trip and taking an evening walk.  Also, some of it I can’t lift by myself, but that’s not the point.  I’m sure one day the clutter will be gone, maybe even a little missed, and replaced with a table with matching chairs.  I just hope that we keep a good amount of color and brightness to the new place, and no reasons for a plate of asparagus to be thrown against the walls.

“This isn’t life!  This is just stuff!  And it’s become more important to you than living!”

Bugsy

Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel (Warren Beatty) was a real life mobster, originally from the New York.  In the forties, he decides to turn a small business trip to Los Angeles into an extended stay, erratically buying a house while his wife, Esta (Wendy Phillips) and kids are waiting for him back in New York.  Siegel meets actress Virginia Hill (Annette Bening) and they start a steamy affair.  When they drive five hours to the desert to check out a tiny gambling oasis, Siegel shuts it down, but help but notice how they make a consistent profit.  He decides to take it upon himself to build the beginnings of Las Vegas and the Flamingo hotel, after his nickname for Virginia and her long legs.  As Siegel is arrested for the murder of Harry Greenberg (Elliott Gould), he entrusts Virginia to oversee all the construction and money handling with the Flamingo.  But is Virginia to be trusted?

What the film portrays best is Siegel’s erratic lifestyle.  Right away, we see him chew a man out for calling him ‘Bugsy’ to his face, a name he did historically despise.  Not long after that, he shoots a man with a whole office full of people watching.  This murder is never explained or catches up to Siegel, it just happens.  Later, when he’s only planning on being in Los Angeles for a few days, he knocks on a man’s front door and offers to buy his house, in cash, for twice of what it’s worth right there on the spot.  When he pulls up in a grey car, we assume he acquired it in a similar crazy deal.  A man who does all these crazy things on a whim could be capable of any convoluted scheme.  Only a crazy mind like Siegel’s could hatch building up a metropolitan oasis in the middle of a desert, like Vegas.  The way Beatty makes this all charismatically believable deserves him the Oscar nomination.

One of the best scenes in the film is when Siegel is at home with his family and his gang of mob buddies show up at the door.  He’s preparing a cake for one of his daughters birthdays, complete with a floppy white chefs hat, yet he ushers the mob men into a den across the house.  Between pitching his big Vegas idea to the men, he runs back across the house trying to please his family as well.  On top of that, he calls someone to make sure they’re watching Virginia, who he seems suspiciously jealous of and has a crazy scheme to meet and assassinate Mussolini.  It’s like a painful plate-spinning act, where we see that Siegel is just spreading himself too thin be successful at all these things he’s trying to keep going.

Honestly, I wanted to like this film more than I did.  Mobsters have always peaked my interest with their lavish lifestyles half in the spotlight and half surrounded by mystery and corruption.  Bugsy had these things, but they just did not satisfy completely.  This film isn’t like a fun game of cops and robbers, but a hard-nosed look at the life of Benjamin Siegel.  The man presumably wanted to become successful in a legitimate way, but he spread himself too thin and all he had to show for it was a failed marriage and a crazy idea for a casino resort in the middle of the desert.  Not many people think of Siegel as they jet off to Vegas looking for a crazy weekend anymore, but they should.

“Why don’t you run outside and jerk yourself a soda.”

The Kids Are All Right

We cannot ignore the fact that modern families are becoming more prevalent in our society.  It wasn’t too long ago that that term referred to a single parent or only the mother working, but now we’re into an era that accepts homosexual couples raising children.  The Kids Are All Right serves to show that a lesbian couple has the same sort of marriage issues as heterosexual couples do and as the title suggests, they can raise kids that turn out all right.

In case you haven’t heard the storyline or are still confused on the process of this couple having children, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) used one sperm donor to conceive and give birth to one child each, making their children biological half-siblings.  Nic gave birth to the oldest child, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) who’s just turned eighteen and about to spend her last summer at home before leaving for college on a scholarship.  Jules gave birth to Laser (Josh Hutcherson), a laid back fifteen year old skater boy who seems to hang around with the wrong type of crowd.  It’s Laser who asks Joni to contact their sperm donor, since she is of age and he is not.  It makes sense, he’s a young boy in a house full of women and looking for a male presence in his life.

So Joni contacts Paul (Mark Ruffalo), she and Laser go to meet him.  Paul seems like an easy going hippie who runs an organic restaurant, and he seems proud of the children his sample produced.  But when the moms hear that their kids have met Paul, whom they never met further than pictures and descriptions in the donor catalogue, they decide to have Paul over for dinner as a family before allowing the kids any further contact with him.  And cue the family turned upside down.

The film shows that a lesbian marriage is no different than straight marriages.  If you want to break the couple into traditional roles, Nic seems to be the breadwinner and the more authoritative figure over the kids.  Jules seems to be the flaky emotional half who stayed at home with the kids when they were younger, and therefore the more understanding one with the children.  As all marriages do, Nic and Jules have their struggles.  After nearly twenty years and raising two kids, that happens to every marriage.  Nic can be critical of Jules and can forget to appreciate her, which makes Jules vulnerable and seeking approval elsewhere.  Let’s be honest, it’s not just men who find themselves in a midlife crisis.

This film excels where lesser films would have plummeted.  These characters are not stereotypes or simple cookie-cutter images of what we assume a lesbian family to be.  They are rounded, detailed, smart and believable with all their imperfections.  The dialogue they are given is fresh, it’s what real people would say in the moment, not flat movie characters.  And if you’re expecting some cop out film full of lesbian jokes, this isn’t it.  This film isn’t the place for cheap tasteless laughs, instead they’re cultivated naturally with witty dialogue and a few awkward situations.  The feel-good comedy vibe is generated by the way the family connects, rather than actual laughs.

In the end, we’re simply reminded that no family is perfect and they don’t need to consist of a traditional mom and dad.  Whether it’s two moms, two dads or one of each, the main elements that kids need from their parents is love and support.  Nic and Jules have done a wonderful job with their children, and I hope the rest of the world can see that and accept other loving families, no matter what their structure.

“It’s hard enough to open your heart in this world.  Don’t make it harder.”

If The Academy is looking to award a film that puts today’s hot topic of gay marriage in a positive, family oriented light, The Kids Are All Right will win Best Picture.