In Alan Ball’s original script of American Beauty, protagonist Lester Burnham, eerily played by the since-disgraced yet theatrically masterful Kevin Spacey, actually did deflower his daughter’s underage friend. DreamWorks finally convinced Ball to rewrite Lester’s decision when he discovers that Angela is a virgin, by reminding him that the protagonists of Greek tragedies experience epiphanies prior to their fatal ends.
Thus a hero and a cultural icon was born.
Two years before 9/11 and 20 years ago this week, the dramedy opened across the country, eventually expanding to 1,500 theaters and then winning the Oscar for Best Picture. American Beauty likely wouldn’t have landed as anything more than Nabokovian smut if Lester had gone through his original idea. Instead, the film was hailed as the seminal satire of the monotony of suburban life and a national loss of meaning.
Yet critics now seek to, as they say, “cancel” the classic as of late, lamenting the banality of a plot driven by a middle-aged white guy wishing to romance the girl next door and impugning its worldview as insufficiently woke.
Ricky, the boy who courts Lester’s daughter Jane, is no longer a reclusive outsider coping with the world through an appreciation for beauty and art. Now he’s inadvertently “insufferable” and “obsess[ive].” Frank’s internalized homophobia is no longer an indictment of a culture that punishes self-actualization and authenticity. Instead, the film itself is homophobic for its “treatment of gayness as a fatal revelation.”
The unbearable desire of Carolyn, Lester’s wife, to have a picture-perfect yet miserable suburban life isn’t an indictment of society’s expectations that women single-handedly glue together the family. Critics now see her not as satirizing sexism but as sanctioning it. Lester’s journey isn’t one so commonplace because it reflects the unfulfillment felt by so many.
Rather, its universality is now lambasted as both hackneyed and privileged.
In other words, our super serious betters in the media have decided to take a movie critical of its self-absorbed and spoiled characters at face value and deem the film an endorsement of them.
Compared to the epics bookending its Best Picture win, Lester’s crisis of meaning feels small, a scope now derided by the film’s critics. But it still shocks and awes and persists. That void in Lester’s soul has reverberated across the country as deaths of despair have catapulted. Jane and Ricky’s loneliness have permeated the next generation of folks flicking left and right in the hopes of joining the waning minority of millennials finding marriage.
The choice not to deflower Angela may earn an excess of praise from the audience, but as the #MeToo revelation revealed, how many men fail to make the choice with which Ball ultimately redeemed Lester? American Beauty regards its characters’ woes with seriousness that leans towards laughable at times, sure, but perhaps we ought to as well.
