Herald rating: * * * *
Running time: 120 mins
Rental: Now
Review: Ewan McDonald
Oscar Wilde, who seems to have turned up quite often in these pages lately, reckoned "there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." Of course, that was before
he saw American Beauty.
Many people have a problem with this movie, despite (or even because of) its seven Oscars earlier this year. Is it an important piece of social commentary or just a story about a dirty old man?
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is Mr Middle-Aged Middle-American Middle-Class White Male. His real-estate agent wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), ignores him; his high-school age daughter, Jane (Thora Birch) doesn't care about him; his boss doesn't need him.
Life changes when his wife drags him along to see their daughter perform as a cheerleader and he is smitten, as they used to say in the Mills and Boons, with his daughter's classmate, Angela (Mena Suvari).
Soon Lester has quit his job, wangled a $60,000 handshake, bought a bright-red 1970 Pontiac Firebird and is serving hamburgers at the local drive-in.
He finds Carolyn is cheating; Jane is being videotaped by Ricky (Wes Bentley), the boy next door, whose ex-Marine dad (Chris Cooper) tests him for drugs every six months.
All of these stories combine one (yep, sorry) dark and stormy night in a series of bizarre misunderstandings that leave Lester with a kind of victory, one that is rare in a mainstream Hollywood movie.
But you'll have to make up your mind if you think it's right for a man in his 40s to lust after a teenage girl. Mind you, haven't New Zealanders been asking themselves that for the past few months?
