This
Journal

November
1999

Last night I did something unusual. I went to a movie. I went by myself. I picked, almost at random, American Beauty with Kevin Spacey. I hadn't heard much about it, but I like this actor and the showtime was right. It turns out that this was the movie I needed.

When I got home I was so full of ideas and feelings that to keep the buzz going I wanted to check out the reviews. You see, I had some hunches about the film and was looking for a critic to confirm or help to extend my own take. So I clicked into the miraculous Movie Review Query Engine and found something like 140 reviews. I read a good bundle of them - big names and no names - and was soon depressed by the utter sameness of them all. After a cloying (word of the week?)string of pretty positive reviews, I fell back to my old buddy Mr. Cranky for some grit. True to form, he didn't like it - but he didn't like it for fairly obvious and superficial reasons which I was (mostly) willing to grant. (He gives it only one bomb.) It's not a perfect film; but, within the conventions of this pop art, it's a very good film. Very good, I think, because it is wittily and consciously taking nourishment from a rich American cultural root system, which includes the transcendentalist movement.

"The mass of men [and women] lead lives of quiet desperation." The antidote? "He cannot be happy or strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."

Most of the reviews cited a kind of "New Age mysticism" at the center of the film. By this they seem to mean the main character/narrator's ultimate insight about the nature of life and another younger character's sensitivity to Beauty floating throughout The Ordinary. The older man is stricken and transformed early on by the beauty of his daughter's friend. The younger finds it in a dead bird, a frozen woman, his girlfriend's sad face and, most perfectly, in a windblown plastic bag.

In his essay on Beauty, Emerson quotes Goethe: "The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us." None of the reviews that I read saw Emerson or Thoreau behind this, yet all this "New Age mysticism" is theirs. (These critics need a refresher course...lemme at'em.)

So many films stand as critiques of the moral and spiritual emptiness of middle-class, material "success" that it may be time to declare a new genre. Consider the likes of: Ordinary People, Blue Velvet, The Breakfast Club, The Stepford Wives, Edward Scissorhands, Risky Business, Lolita, Rebel Without a Cause, All That Heaven Allows, The Graduate, Heathers, The Heartbreak Kid, Over The Edge. This last is a creepy, under-rated piece from 1979 which descibes the impossible gap between suburban adults and their disafffected kids. And that's on American Beauty turf.

But a caution: If you are a Sensitive Soul, avoid this film. You will be too shocked and distracted by the sexual behavior, language, and nudity (which, contra Mr. Cranky, is not gratuitous) to be able to consider the deeper reaches of the film. One of the most admirable characters is a successful drug dealer. Another could be seen as a borderline pedophile. I was made uncomfortable and a bit sad by the many very young teens in the audience. The rating system is a joke...for many reasons. This film, like Eyes Wide Shut, really is for mature audiences more capable of wrestling with some of its darker conundrums. Kids (of any age) just wont get it.

What's it all about? Eggshells and Miracle-Gro...or desire desire desire?

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.
R. W. Emerson