Review – American Beauty

I guess I’ve seen worse mid-life-crisis movies. Still, I fear that if this movie is any indication, the boomers who rebelled against their parents in the 60s are now ripe to rebel against themselves for becoming their parents in the 90s. Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning turn in solid performances as a suburban couple who feel stifled by each other. The wife copes with her crumbling marriage and unsatisfying real estate job by sleeping with one of her competitors, while the husband overcomes his feelings of emasculation by quitting his job, pumping iron, buying a classic muscle car, and otherwise regressing to teenager-dom. There’s also a vaguely Nabokov-esque thing between the Spacey character and one of his daughter’s teammates on the high school cheerleading squad. Some of the comedy works fairly well, but in the end it just doesn’t come across as anywhere near as profound a statement about American life as it pretends to be (or as some critics apparently thought it was). Mildly amusing