Sam Mendes
American Beauty

"There is so much beauty in the world", reads the key phrase of one of the most celebrated (and in my opinion overrated) films of the last decade.

Yes, beauty: there is so much of it in the world. However, it's not always easy to separate it from the chaos of modernity, to capture it and represent it with order and rigor in artistic form: and "American beauty" is the clearest example of this. A paradigm of cinema that stages an overused and now mannered socio-bourgeois decline to compensate for its own aesthetic and cultural void, resulting in an amorphous emotional tension and narrative twists that are at times even trite.

The ordeal of Lester (played by Kevin Spacey, masterful although suffocated by a limping script) unfolds along the classic coordinates of alienation from capitalist society, staged in the opulent American suburb at the end of the Babylonian Clinton era. This way of the cross is represented in a formally impeccable manner, and all in all captivating to enjoy from the comfort of a chair: the anonymous gears of a homologating and oppressive production system, family affections liquefied by mutual incommunicability and plasticized in the pursuit of the almighty dollar (exemplary is the character of Carolyn, practically a caricature of Hillary Clinton), the search for an "escape from reality" in the drug pusher friend of the daughter, the repressed homosexual marine all about home and family who pretends to drink the rhetoric of young Reagan movies and whose torment will break the equilibrium of the film. Nothing new under the sun, but by and large it works.

The chilling problem of "American beauty" arises when a director who professes to be a leftist intellectual like Sam Mendes (whose subsequent lackluster works have luckily rightfully downsized him) stages what is to counteract the mid-life crisis of the bourgeois male: a Lolita as an instrument of spiritual regeneration. Good heavens! Truly terrible is the short circuit operated by the juncture in which - to the notes of the nevertheless magnificent "Don't let it bring you down" by Neil Young covered by Annie Lennox - Lester gives up his erotic dream discovering how the nymphet who infested his imagination, after all, was a good girl. And if she hadn't been? Would he have slept with her anyway, instead of finding peace of mind and awareness of what really matters (surely the dreadful Muccino from "L'ultimo bacio" must have coined slogans like "the real revolution is normality", and just for having inspired such Italianate drifts Mendes should be stoned) a few moments before being killed?
At that point, there are two ways out. Lester becoming a martyr of what society has repressed and he believes he has rediscovered (society has repressed homosexuality, Lester has discovered nymphets). Otherwise, the aesthetic choice: Ricky who sees beauty everywhere, even in dead things, lingering in the ecstatic contemplation of a shattered skull.

Is that really all there is? These are petty bourgeois problems with petty bourgeois solutions, selfish, mean, and a touch of perversion is not enough to épater les bourgeois. Do we want to create socially and culturally motivated cinema? Perfect. But there are far bigger problems, and the answers must be far different.