The Monsters of Maple Street

by Pat Holmes

h, suburbia. For the last half of the 20th century it's been perhaps America's most treasured repository of hopes and dreams, and most reliable target for ridicule. No sooner had the idealized enclaves blossomed in abundance in the fertile atmosphere of the post-World War II economic boom than they rose like tombstones for the American Dream in our literature and films. These developments in the no-man's-land between dream and nightmare remain a rich environment in which satire can thrive or die, depending on the skills of its practitioners.

Suburbia lives in Kevin Spacey's performance as Lester Burnham, the already dead hero of American Beauty. Take a good look at his face and if his smile looks out of place, if you look closer it's easy to trace the tracts of his tears. He has a lovely home, well tended by his lovely wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) when she isn't trying to sell others just like it. He has a lucrative job with Media Monthly magazine that he's on the verge of losing, a distant and resentful teenage daughter, Jane (Thora Birch) and a monkey-spanking habit that makes his morning shower the highlight of his day. Until one night a chore-like trip to the high school gym to prove their interest in Jane yields Lester an epiphany in the Lolitoid form of Jane's fellow cheerleader Angela (Mena Suvari). She's a vision in rose petals—the accessories of Lester's dreams—and Lester rallies in response, quitting his soul-destroying job (after ensuring a hefty severance check via blackmail) to reclaim his youth by pumping iron, flipping burgers, and smoking reefer he buys from the mysterious kid next door, Ricky (Wes Bentley), who's striking up an interesting voyeurism-based relationship with Jane.

The directorial debut of hot British stage director Sam Mendes (he did an acclaimed revival of Cabaret recently, as well as The Blue Room, heavily hyped for Nicole Kidman's nudity), American Beauty is a study of thwarted hopes that thwarts expectations in consistently rewarding fashion.

he script by sitcom veteran Alan Ball is ambitious and risky enough to challenge even an experienced filmmaker. Mendes rises to the occasion with enough sophistication to offset some undeniable flaws and occasionally achieve the terrible beauty he seeks in the most banal surroundings. The script is an at once twisted and expansive take on what could easily be simple sitcom material. Mendes navigates this minefield of potential disasters with a fluid precision that never loses sight of emotional fault lines. Mendes' assurance is matched, if not topped, by Spacey's dead-man-waltzing eloquence as Lester, a performance that fully realizes the role's potential for comedy and poignancy.

Perhaps even more impressive (if only because we tend to expect excellence from Spacey) is newcomer Bentley, who brings a gripping fascination to the camcorder voyeur-next-door, a character that could easily become a sort of sinister geek or just a confusing muddle. Bentley's Ricky is a tricky blend of sneakiness and spirituality who comes to embody much of the sense of mystery and even awe that darkens and deepens as the film progresses. It takes longer for Bening to break through to the desperation that fuels Carolyn's manic compulsiveness, but this has more to do with the script than the performance.

Birch has the adolescent resentment and angst down, though she's probably the most sullen cheerleader anyone has ever seen. More problematic are Suvari's aggressive, cynical sexpot and Ricky's too-tightly-wrapped dad (Chris Cooper), a retired Marine who has reduced his wife (Allison Janney) to a traumatized zombie. Both these roles are finally defined largely by last-minute contrivances that Suvari mostly overcomes but that even Cooper's best efforts cannot (and his is the weightier and more critical).

The imminence of Spacey's death, foretold in the opening moments, is also slightly perplexing; though it does create some of the seemingly intended emotional acuity, it also provides for some late-stage suspense with an annoying whodunit (or who's-gonna-do-it) aspect that is unwelcome. But Mendes's frequently masterful mood shifts and his ability to find what Ricky describes as "the life behind things"—to offer the appearance, or threat, of a cliché and then redeem it by going deeper—carries the film with a haunting and sometimes poetic grace beyond its problems (including the problems with presentation which seem to be developing into the rule rather than the exception at Regal Cinemas).

The contributions of master cinematographer Conrad Hall and production designer Naomi Shohan are crucial in the creation of the film's sense of revelation, of the complex human life behind almost cartoonishly simple things—the life that often bursts out surprisingly as the vibrant red of billowing rose petals or sprays of blood.

Two other new films venture beyond the suburbs to small towns where enigmatic strangers reveal more about the those around them than themselves.

he lighter of the two, Lawrence Kasdan's Mumford, is a sweet-natured but slight look at the effects of a psychiatrist named Mumford (Loren Dean, neatly cast as an intriguing cipher) on many of the residents of the town of Mumford (state unspecified, though it was attractively shot in Northern California). Dr Mumford has a secret he keeps better than he does those revealed to him by his clients, but they're not complaining. You won't either, if you're in an undemanding mood. Kasdan's skill with ensembles remains intact, as does his sympathetic interest in uncertain, adrift characters (from the Baby Boomers of The Big Chill to the wanderers and settlers of Silverado, to the lawyer who drifts into lust, murder and suckerdom in Body Heat to the unstrung-by-grief parents of The Accidental Tourist). But in the end, much of the sense of drift can be attributed to weightlessness.

The small coastal California town of The Minus Man unknowingly plays host to a serial killer (erstwhile movie goofball Owen Wilson) in whom the locals see themselves reflected more than Wilson sees himself revealed. Wilson amiably fills the role of empty vessel and the fine supporting cast is topped by Brian Cox as the self-punishing husband from who Wilson rents a room (the wife is Mercedes Reuhl) and a surprisingly tolerable and clean-looking Janeane Garofalo as a postal worker attracted to the newcomer. The directorial debut of 61-year-old screenwriter Hampton Fancher (who authored the first draft of Blade Runner) has some creepily placid atmosphere but suffers from the tendency of many independent films to think simply being different is enough. It's not enough here and the feeling of aimlessness drifts into a seeming lack of direction and even narrative cohesion as this curiosity slowly goes on—"develops" would be too strong a word.

—Pat Holmes

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