American Beauty (film)

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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 United States
Language English
Budget $15,000,000 (estimated)[1]
Gross revenue $356,296,601
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

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. All four were nominated for Academy Awards, and the film won a total of five including Best Picture.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a cynical 42-year-old who works in an advertising agency that he hates just as much as his life in the suburbs. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is an ambitious but bitter realtor. Their daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is a teenage cheerleader contemplating plastic surgery. Neither Lester nor Carolyn are happy with their marriage, and each blames the other one for their unhappiness. They spend dinner bickering across the table or in an icy silence, which costs both of them Jane's respect.

A family consisting of Colonel Frank Fitts, USMC (Chris Cooper), his emotionally detached wife Barbara (Allison Janney) and their introspective son Ricky (Wes Bentley) moves next door to the Burnhams. Jane soon notices Ricky videotaping her through her bedroom window, which secretly flatters her.

Lester finds motivation for transforming himself after meeting Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), Jane's best friend and classmate. Angela, a beautiful, confident and ostensibly promiscuous cheerleader who aspires to be a model, captivates Lester the moment he sees her perform in a school dance routine at a basketball game. He develops an obvious crush on her, much to Jane's embarrassment and disgust. Angela, however, finds Lester "sweet" and later comments to Jane that if he were more muscular, she would "totally fuck him," which Lester overhears. He then starts an intensive workout regimen.

Following a meeting at a realtor's convention, Carolyn begins an extramarital affair with rival realtor Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher), whom she admires for his success. At his advice, she begins relieving her stress at a shooting range. Meanwhile, Lester's life begins to turn around after he has yet another fight with his wife, who he secretly enjoys annoying, when she catches him masturbating. He becomes insubordinate toward the "efficiency expert" hired by his company which results in his termination, though he is able to blackmail his boss for an enormous severance package. He begins work anew at a fast food restaurant, Mr. Smiley's, wanting a job with the "least possible amount of responsibility," which infuriates Carolyn, who then had to shoulder the bulk of the household's financial responsibility.

Jane and Ricky bond over camcorder footage of a plastic bag "dancing" in the wind, which Ricky considers the most beautiful thing he has ever recorded. Ricky also bonds with Lester over recollections of the B-movies Re-Animator and Beastmaster which is used as a pretext to Lester purchasing high-grade marijuana from Ricky.

Some time later, Carolyn and Buddy Kane enter the drive-thru of the fast food restaurant where Lester now works. The unintended meeting leads Buddy to break off his relationship with Carolyn. She angrily drives home with her gun with the intention of confronting her husband. Meanwhile, Lester calls Ricky to the house for marijuana, raising the suspicions of an already angry Col. Fitts, who watches the two in Lester's garage. He aggressively confronts Ricky upon his return home, and recognizing the opportunity to be free from his family, Ricky plays in to his father's mistaken impression, claiming that he is a prostitute. Col. Fitts becomes violent, and disowns him.

Ricky asks Jane to leave with him for New York City. Jane not only agrees, but offers to supply money that she has been saving for a breast augmentation, though Ricky is unconcerned with money as his marijuana sales had provided him a steady source of income and a cache of $40,000. Angela, who is visiting Jane's house, accuses both of being "freaks," to which Ricky retorts that she is ugly, ordinary, and boring. Angela is devastated, the implication being that Ricky has exposed her deepest fear; that she suspects she is indeed ordinary. At the same time, Lester is quietly approached in his garage while working out by a distraught Col. Fitts, who has been out in the rain. Lester attempts to comfort Col. Fitts who kisses him, believing him to be a homosexual based on what he had seen earlier. Lester rejects this advance calmly as a misunderstanding, and Fitts leaves, humiliated.

Lester finds a vulnerable Angela in tears. He admits his attraction to her, and that he has been working out. He begins to undress her, but she admits that she is a virgin. This gives him pause and he relents. Conversing with Angela in the kitchen, Lester realizes that he has become truly happy. As Angela heads to the bathroom, Lester contemplates an old photo of his smiling family - unaware that a gun is being held to the back of his head. The movie ends with Lester's description of his life flashing before his eyes, interspersed with scenes of his family and others at the moment of the gunshot. Ricky and Jane react from the upstairs bedroom, Angela from a bathroom, Carolyn from outside the front door (where she had been approaching the house with her own gun to confront her husband). As Carolyn disposes of her gun, Col. Fitts is seen back in his own house removing latex gloves and a blood-soaked shirt.

[edit] Cast

[edit] 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 Mena Suvari gradually using more, to emphasize their shifting perceptions of themselves.

Singer and dancer Paula Abdul choreographed the cheerleading scene.[3] 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 (rather than acted) reactions of shock to Bening and Birch's faces.

[edit] Deleted plotlines

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

Alan Ball's original screenplay had opening and ending scenes in which Col. Fitts frames Jane and Ricky for the murder of Lester. They go to jail, but Col. Fitts' wife finds his bloody shirt and sends it to the authorities. After shooting these scenes, Sam 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]

[edit] 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. The soundtrack features songs by artists such as The Who, Free, Eels, 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.

[edit] 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]

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. 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.

[edit] Awards

The movie dominated the 2000 Oscars, with a total of eight nominations and five wins. It also had another 82 wins and 63 nominations at numerous other award ceremonies.

[edit] Wins

[edit] Nominations

  • Academy Award for Best Actress (Annette Bening)
  • Academy Award for Original Music Score (Thomas Newman)
  • Academy Award for Film Editing (Tariq Anwar)
  • American Cinema Editors, USA: Eddie for Best Edited Feature Film - Dramatic
  • American Comedy Awards, USA: American Comedy Award for Funniest Motion Picture, Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)
  • Art Directors Guild: Excellence in Production Design Award for Feature Film
  • Awards of the Japanese Academy: Award of the Japanese Academy for Best Foreign Film
  • BAFTA Award for Best Direction (David Lean Award for Direction) (Sam Mendes)
  • BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay - Original (Alan Ball)
  • BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Wes Bentley)
  • BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Thora Birch)
  • BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Mena Suvari)
  • BAFTA Award for Best Sound
  • BAFTA Award for Best Production Design
  • BAFTA Award for Best Make Up/Hair
  • Blockbuster Entertainment Awards: Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Actress - Drama, Favorite Supporting Actor- Drama, Favorite Supporting Actress - Drama, Favorite Actor - Drama, Favorite Actress - Newcomer (Internet Only)
  • BRIT Awards: Brit for Best Soundtrack
  • Chicago Film Critics Association Awards: CFCA Award for Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Actress
  • Cinema Audio Society, USA: C.A.S. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for a Feature Film

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b 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. "Beauty displays Hollywood's new cliches" (fee required), Boston Globe, 2000-03-24. 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. "Pitching Fitts", Entertainment Weekly, 2000-03-27. Retrieved on 2008-04-01. 
  7. ^ Vern Perry. "These discs go to extremes", The Orange County Register, 2000-10-30. Retrieved on 2008-02-23. 
  8. ^ Sragow, Michael. "American BJ", Salon.com, 2000-03-30. Retrieved on 2006-07-16. (English) 
  9. ^ Weinraub, Bernard. "At the Movies", The New York Times, 1999-07-02. Retrieved on 2006-07-05. (English) 
  10. ^ Hoberman, J.. "Boomer Bust", The Village Voice. Retrieved on 2006-07-05. (English) 

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Awards
Preceded by
Shakespeare in Love		 Academy Award for Best Picture
1999		 Succeeded by
Gladiator
Preceded by
Saving Private Ryan		 Golden Globe for Best Picture - Drama
1999
Preceded by
Shakespeare in Love		 BAFTA Award for Best Film
1999
v • d • e
Films directed by Sam Mendes
American Beauty (1999) • Road to Perdition (2002) • Jarhead (2005) • Revolutionary Road (2008)
v • d • e
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)
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