Suburban Spaceyman

As a theatre director, Sam Mendes is celebrated for breathing new life into classics (Chekhov, Shakespeare, Schnitzler, O'Casey) and reviving modern works (Cabaret, Company, The Front Page), rather than for producing original texts. Significantly, in the new play for which he is best known, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, the heroine has an uncanny ability to make old songs sound more vibrantly authentic than when sung by their famous creators. In turning to the cinema with his directorial debut, American Beauty, Mendes manages to give individuality and distinction to some extremely familiar material.

Fifty years ago when McCall's carried the sub-title 'the magazine of togetherness', the term 'dysfunctional family' would have been regarded as an oxymoron; today, the term is virtually a tautology. But starting with Death of a Salesman and such influential texts of the Fifties as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Exurbanites, The Lonely Crowd and The Organisation Man, Americans were told that the national dream was a sham, the nuclear family a nightmare, the corporate existence a form of living death. In the following decade there was a revolt against convention and conformity from which the country has not fully recovered. This is the background to American Beauty, a black comedy about a typical middle-class American family, 'typical' nowadays being a synonym for 'dysfunctional'.

As the movie opens, its anti-hero narrator, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) tells us he's 42 and 'in less than a year I'll be dead ... in a real sense I'm dead already'. A creation of the rebellious Sixties who assumed the mantle of suburban conformity, Lester loathes his job on Media Monthly, is hated by his teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch), and despised by his frigid estate-agent wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening). The neighbours to the left are a couple of well-adjusted gay yuppies, both called Jim; the neighbours to the right are a rigid homophobic ex-US marine, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), his near-catatonic wife and their disturbed 18-year-old son Ricky (Wes Bentley), who deals drugs to subsidise his hobby of recording the world on video. This is the caricatured stuff of sitcoms, and the screenwriter, Alan Ball, spent three seasons as writer-producer of Cybill. But if Lester has elements of the jovial suburban dropout that Richard Briers played in The Good Life he also carries within him the tragic sense of James Thurber's Walter Mitty and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman.

Lester's actions and attitudes are all to be found in the protagonists of similar movies - Grand Canyon, The Ice Storm, Bulworth, Happiness, Election, Fight Club - all as interesting as American Beauty, several of them sharper and with a better sense of community.

The high point of Lester's day, he says, is masturbating in his morning shower; he abandons his job after black-mailing a personnel manager into making a generous severance payment; he reverts to irresponsible adolescence, buying the Seventies car of his dreams, smoking pot bought from Ricky next door, listening to rock music, getting an undemanding job in a hamburger joint, telling everyone exactly what he thinks. This downward mobility is seen as admirable, as opposed to his wife's business activities which are viewed as risible and never more so than when she becomes the lover of a real-estate rival.

Lester, with underlying hints of displaced incest, is drawn to his daughter's best friend, the self-consciously sexy high-school cheerleader Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), whose surname sounds the same as that of Dolores Haze, better known as Lolita. This dubious relationship inspires a series of surreal fantasies that relate to the film's central theme as expressed in the title. The cold, materialist Carolyn Burnham grows American Beauties, those roses noted for their large red petals, in the front garden beside the white picket fence. She then uses them as genteel decorations in her sterile home. In his dreams Lester imagines Angela on a bed of red rose petals, and in a bath with petals covering the surface; when in his mind's eye she unbuttons her dress, a flurry of petals flies from her breasts. Lester's sexual obsession is of a familiar kind and treated rather broadly, and we are invited to think him some sort of moral hero when he eventually refuses to take advantage of Angela at her most vulnerable.

Lester's lust and Carolyn's emptiness are contrasted with the true spirituality of Ricky from next door. Far from being the voyeur he at first seems, Ricky is the true observer and recorder of the beauty of the everyday America that lies around him. The mystic heir to William Blake and Walt Whitman, he can see the wondrousness of life itself in a plastic bag being blown in the wind.

Mendes has a very good way with actors and the performances are first-rate, with Kevin Spacey and Chris Cooper quite outstanding. Cooper's career officer with his overbearing manner and suppressed homosexuality is a walking liberal cliche transformed into a sad aching individual. Spacey, who in Glengarry Glen Ross and Swimming With Sharks played the sort of insensitive bullies Lester is rebelling against, has an astonishing ability to portray divided, two-faced characters like Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, whom he impersonated so brilliantly on stage. He can switch between charm and menace, pursuer and prey, victor and victim, with the flick of a nerve in the cheek or a tightening of the eyes.

Mendes has also, with the help of his designers and the veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall, given the movie a stylised look that is at once painterly and theatrical. He uses very deliberate compositions like the framing of the Burnham family at the dinner table or their neighbours watching TV, and the images have a hard, thin, elegant surface, as if rendered in enamel. The movie's least satisfying aspect is the way it sets itself up as a thriller, though in the ultimate payoff there is here an intriguing, one supposes intentional, reference to The Great Gatsby.