Sam Mendes's directorial debut. Five Oscars including Best Picture. The 1999 suburban-American drama that has, since the Kevin Spacey allegations, become impossible to discuss without complications.
Suburban America, contemporary. Lester Burnham — a 42-year-old advertising-copy writer in a deteriorating marriage to his real-estate-agent wife Carolyn, with a sullen teenage daughter Jane — narrates the film from beyond his own death. The film tracks Lester across approximately the final six months of his life. He quits his job, takes a fast-food position, begins working out, develops an obsessive infatuation with his daughter's high-school friend Angela, and begins buying marijuana from the teenage son of the new next-door neighbours.
Other parallel plot lines develop. Carolyn has an affair with a competitor real-estate agent. Jane begins a relationship with the neighbour boy Ricky Fitts. Ricky's father — Colonel Frank Fitts, a Marine Corps veteran — is depicted as homophobic, cruel, and (in a late revelation) secretly attracted to Lester. The film closes with Colonel Fitts murdering Lester, having misread the relationship between Lester and his son. Lester's narrating voice closes the film by stating that the final emotion he felt was gratitude for the small specific beauty he had been progressively able to notice.
American Beauty won five Oscars at the 2000 ceremony — Best Picture, Best Director (Sam Mendes), Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Original Screenplay (Alan Ball), Best Cinematography (Conrad Hall). The film was, in 1999, widely considered one of the most-significant American releases of the decade. The five-Oscar sweep was, by general industry consensus, deserved.
What the 1999 reception was honouring was a film that, on its surface, was a critique of American suburban dysfunction. The marriage that has become performance, the teenage daughter's alienation, the corporate work that has hollowed Lester out, the Marine-Corps neighbour whose authoritarianism is the film's antagonist. The critique was, in 1999, recognised as serious and important. The film was, at the time, considered the canonical American suburban drama of the post-war period.
Kevin Spacey's 2017 sexual-misconduct accusations — and his subsequent removal from House of Cards, from completed films (Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World replaced him with Christopher Plummer in nine days of reshoots), and from broader industry employment — have made American Beauty significantly more difficult to discuss. The 2020s critical reception has often involved separating the film's craft achievements from the lead performance whose creator's behaviour subsequent revelations have complicated.
The structural problem is that the film's central plot involves a 42-year-old man's sexual obsession with a high-school friend of his daughter's. The 1999 framing treated the obsession as the protagonist's mid-life crisis, and Lester's eventual decision not to act on his fantasy (the scene in which Angela reveals she is actually a virgin and Lester withdraws) was treated as the film's moral resolution. The 2020s framing of the same material is harder to land cleanly. The film's craft achievements are real; the lead performance's biographical context is now inescapable in discussion.
Conrad Hall's Best Cinematography Oscar for American Beauty was, by general consensus, deserved on craft grounds. The film's visual register — the suburban-interior framing, the carefully-composed exterior shots, the use of small visual details to establish character — was at the level of working Hollywood craft at its highest. Hall was, by 1999, one of the most-respected working American cinematographers; he had previously won for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
The most-iconic single sequence is the floating-plastic-bag shot — Ricky Fitts shows Jane a video he recorded of a plastic bag blowing in autumn leaves outside a building doorway, which he describes as the most-beautiful thing he has ever seen. The sequence runs roughly two minutes. The bag-as-beauty sequence has been parodied extensively (most-famously in the broader cultural reception of the film's aesthetic register) and has become cultural shorthand for late-1990s American suburban-cinema's specific approach to finding meaning in mundane visual detail.