Running time: 122 minutes
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari
Rating 9 out of 10
Lester Burnham (Spacey) is reaching the end of a very long rope.He's middle-aged, with a stroppy 16 year old daughter called Jane (Thora Birch), a picture-perfect estate agent wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) who's far more turned on by career targets, a long-term job suddenly threatened by corporate stream-lining and a sudden lustful fascination with Jane's sexpot schoolchum Angela (Mena Suvari).
Most other men would seek therapy. Or take up golf. But not Lester Burnham. Because something inside him has quietly snapped. And boredom, frustration, humiliation and convention will no longer be tolerated - he's going to start calling it like he sees it.
As an everyman cutting loose in memorable but always convincing fashion, Spacey displays once again why he's widely regarded as one of the finest thesps of his generation.
But though ostensibly hinging on him as narrator, this searing examination of a family trapped in anonymous suburbia and unravelling at the seams actually spins through three lives - Lester, Carolyn and Jane - and their attendant neurosis.
Casting, as ever, is paramount (and, in the cases of the younger roles at least, was painstaking) and there's not one person out of place here.
From the outward nerdishness but inner cool of next door neighbour Ricky (Wes Bentley) to Jane's inferiority complex masking fierce intelligence, from Carolyn's heated pursuit of independent success yet need for an orthodox provider-figure to Angela's apparently cocksure wannabe model, no-one is two-dimensional, everyone gets a character arc, and each performance is spot-on.
Of course, it's testing, arresting stuff: flouting accepted moral codes in following Lester's explosive, middle-aged rebellion, wallowing in the meltdown of society's perfect nuclear family.
And with voyeurism, small-scale drug-dealing, strains of Lolita and military fascism muddying the waters, it's small wonder that controversy was stirred up in the American heartland.
Perhaps, here in Blighty, we're just that bit further away. Or perhaps our natures are more disposed to the awful fascination of the traffic accident, more prepared to scratch at the shiny veneer and accept that things are often just a step away from falling apart.
Either way, American Beauty is likely to do much better business over here, where it strikes chords with a darker humour. And without requiring even one gag, it's consistently funny in a spiky, near-the-bone sense: compelling, not always comfy viewing.
