Sam Mendes
American Beauty

"American Beauty" is the directorial debut, dated 1999, of theater aficionado Sam Mendes.

The plot is roughly as follows: the protagonist Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), an average middle-aged man, narrates his story after having died. He seemed to lead a perfect life, but in reality, he was unhappy and frustrated, with a wife (Annette Bening) exhausted and obsessed with career success; a daughter (Thora Birch) a typical moody teenager; and a job that demanded total dedication and robotic efficiency.

He was completely resigned to his sad situation until two boys, his daughter's classmates, rekindled in him a nostalgia for his lost youth. They are Angela (Mena Suvari), with whom he falls in love; and Ricky (Wes Bentley), his next-door neighbor, who awakens in him a certain desire for rebellion...

It's the grainy image of a simple camcorder that opens the film. On the screen, a girl is seen talking to the person filming her. The girl speaks about the antipathy she feels towards her father, and the interlocutor offers to kill him for her. After these initial few minutes, the title appears, elegant, subtle, red on a black background, whose meaning considerably clashes with the image just seen: American beauty, American beauty.

It's from this point that, with no other titles, the true opening of the film starts. It opens with a very long shot, an aerial view depicting a bourgeois neighborhood of similar and linear houses, moving in slowly. Now the photography appears clean and the colors bright, in sharp contrast to the opening scene. The narrator's voice-over starts speaking directly to the audience: he introduces himself as Lester Burnham and immediately reveals that in less than a year he will be dead (what we will see from this point on will be a full flashback). The voice continues to narrate, introducing the family members.

The wife Carolyn is introduced with the detail of a magnificent red rose that we discover to be part of her perfect garden. The following close-up of the woman holding the freshly cut rose reveals not a few things: first of all, it’s impossible to ignore that Carolyn is gardening in a suit (even the voice-over ironically notes "how the gloves on the shears harmonize with the gardening clogs"). In the background, the typical American wooden house is noticeable, in an improbable and optimistic pastel blue color. One also glimpses the neighboring houses, very similar, almost emphasizing, together with the aerial shot at the beginning, that the situation shown in the film is nothing more than a randomly chosen example from the multitude of similar family realities of a certain bourgeois America.

The presentation of the family is ironically interrupted to introduce (in a typically American politically correct attitude) the homosexual neighbors, caught in a charming yet unnecessary exchange of gardening advice with Carolyn. The meeting of the family members then continues with Jane, the young daughter (and the protagonist of the terrible initial statement); you immediately get a sense of what type of character she is, as we see her in one of the typical moments of teenage crisis (stuffing her bra). Further information on the family situation comes from the following scene, where Carolyn waits for Lester in front of a luxurious jeep, she will be the one to drive the daughter to school and the husband to work...

The narrating Lester and the narrated Lester immediately appear as two distinct and starkly contrasting figures: one, confident, capable of clearly and lucidly understanding reality; the other, idiotic and resigned, a discordant note in the harmony presented to us. The interior scenes of the Burnham house display a series of elegant details (photographs, flowers); they are static, orderly images, resembling still lifes.

Even the image of the family dining (by candlelight...) is splendidly centered: the film is entirely played on the contrast between the stylistic perfection of the shots and the harshness of the dramatic content. However, the imperfect images of the first scene often return; it is discovered that Ricky produces them with the help of a simple camcorder with which he enjoys filming the world.

As the story progresses, a transformation occurs; or rather, the great metamorphosis of the film takes place, where the contrast between the saturated and perfect images of the camera and the grainy and shaky ones of the boy's camcorder is reversed. Paradoxically, everything that is beautiful, intense, and poetic in the world only passes through the imperfection of Ricky's videotapes, while the "centering" and formal richness of the rest flatten to simple cogs in the mechanism of contemporary bourgeois society's fiction.

The transition occurs in the sequence where Ricky shows Jane his videos. The image is once again symmetrical (the two half-figures of the kids from behind and the TV at the center), but the zoom performed by the camera tightening onto the ungainly image of the screen marks the surpassing of fake perfection, focusing on the poetry of a paper bag flying in the wind without caring about the fact that that image is not artificially manipulated. From this moment on, the centered images of the Burnham house will appear even more false than they previously seemed. The only refuge for Jane will be to be filmed by Ricky, allowing herself to be filtered, like that paper bag, through the poetry of the boy's lens.

"American Beauty" is the result of a perfect production work. A work misunderstood by many and heavily criticized precisely because it was formally too similar to the glossy films constantly churned out by Hollywood. In reality, the film consciously exploits that "dream factory" aesthetic, with the clear intent of using it against itself.

The film narrates the hypocrisy and falseness of the lifestyle of American bourgeois families; and it does so, linguistically speaking, by playing the very same game of the society it criticizes: lying. The decision to create a film on this theme with a flagrantly clear and perfect photograph and a "soap-opera" interlocking structure can't be attributed to a supposed superficial/commercial nature of the film, but is indeed a way to highlight how reality can be much different from what it seems at first glance.

Sometimes the true beauty the title talks about can be more relatable to the imperfection of the first scene of the film rather than the subsequent visual splendor, accepting the world and life for what they are, without forcing them into a false improvement.