Los Angeles Magazine, October 1999

America the beautiful. By James Greenberg Sam Mendes's extraordinary AMERICAN BEAUTY and David Lynch's surprisingly sincere THE STRAIGHT STORY examine both sides of our national soul IT'S BEEN 13 YEARS SINCE David Lynch's Blue Velvet scratched the surface of small-town American life and found the dark night of the soul underneath. Even today it stands as a testament to decaying values and secret desires. In its excess and exaggeration, Blue Velvet was the perfect film for the '80s. But even as Lynch resurfaces with the surprisingly sweet, G-rated The Straight Story, the time seems right for a movie to plow the depths of our twisted national psyche at the turn of the century. American Beauty is that film, and it is one of the best of the year, maybe the decade. American Beauty is all the more stunning for being the debut film of British theater director Sam Mendes. Celebrated for baring Nicole Kidman's butt in The Blue Room and his recent revival of Cabaret, Mendes seems to have a talent for making the blackest material accessible. In Cabaret he drew the audience in by setting up the theater as a club where the patrons were guests, not just spectators. In American Beauty, as the camera sweeps over the treetops of an ordinary-looking town, we enter normal lives that are soon revealed to be teetering on the edge of mayhem. But American Beauty is not a somber exercise in despair. It is by turns light, playful and pointedly funny. Ranging from the achingly beautiful to the brutishly ugly, the film creates a portrait of life at the millennium with the acuity sometimes only a foreigner can bring to bear on America. Structurally ambitious, the movie gives away its main plot point in the opening moments, when Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) announces that in less than a year he'll be dead. The story then circles back a few months, only to reach this juncture again in the middle of the film, then charges ahead to a conclusion of dazzling complexity. In his floating, mellifluous voice, Spacey narrates and gracefully embodies Lester's fall and resurrection. He is a man whose life has slowly slipped away until he realizes, at age 42, that nothing is left. He has a meaningless job, a wife he doesn't talk to and a daughter he doesn't understand. He describes his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) as the kind of woman whose gardening gloves and pruning shears are color coordinated. After years of neglect, she has tamed her energy to selling houses; she sells, therefore she is. The catalyst for Lester's awakening is sudden lust for his daughter's best friend Angela (Mena Suvari), whom he first observes as a cheerleader at a high school basketball game. It's as if he goes into a trance and, for better and worse, emerges as the person he always wanted to be. He quits his job, starts smoking pot, buys a red 1975 Firebird and works religiously at getting back into shape. He has elaborate sexual fantasies about Angela and imagines her as a saving grace wrapped in red rose petals. But like most assumptions in this film, things are not always what they appear. In reality, all these people are lost souls desperately searching for an identity. Lester's alienated daughter Jane (Thora Birch) hooks up with Ricky (a riveting Wes Bentley), a new kid on the block with the intense gaze of a madman. A drug dealer and first-class voyeur, he tapes everything from Jane undressing to a scrap of paper blowing in the wind. He seems destined to become either an artist or a serial killer. And no wonder. His mother is near catatonic and his father, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), is a military man with a mean streak and a violent temper. As a character, Fitts may be a bit over the top, but as a force of evil, he's the real thing. Such is the ambiguity of characters in American Beauty that Lester's life could be in danger at the hands of three different people. The multidimensional story builds layer upon layer while leaving room for the unexpected. Sometimes it feels like we're witnessing private moments of psychological hell. In one scene, after failing to interest buyers in a house she's selling, Carolyn breaks down, sobbing violently; the camera just stays there and watches. Mendes tells the story in a simple, elegant style. First-time screenwriter Alan Ball, liberated from the shackles of TV sitcoms, has supplied a script of great vibrancy and sensitivity. After seven years of marriage to Warren Beatty and a series of indifferent movies, Bening here seems to instinctively understand a woman's desperation to express herself. And Spacey, creased and worn around the edges, manages the trick of taking a compromised character beyond sympathetic to heartbreaking. In the final scene, in which Lester's life flashes in front of him, the writing and imagery achieve a level of cinematic poetry rarely reached in contemporary films. THE STRAIGHT STORY MAY BE THE most radical departure for a filmmaker this year. With movies like Eraserhead and the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, Lynch staked out the subterranean as his turf. But this time out he has confounded expectations with a fresh, heartfelt slice of Americana. The film opens in typical Lynch territory--a small town in Iowa. It's a languid summer day, and the colors are deep and almost surreal, suggesting that some terrible things are about to happen. They don't. The title refers not only to the true story of Alvin Straight, but to the way Lynch tells the tale. Some critics may feel that after the incomprehensible Lost Highway, The Straight Story is a calculated career move on the part of Lynch. But any trace of possible insincerity is redeemed by Richard Farnsworth's luminous, Oscar-caliber performance as the 73-year-old Straight. The old geezer is in failing health and lives alone with his slightly daffy daughter (Sissy Spacek). When he gets word that his long-estranged brother has suffered a stroke, he swallows his pride and decides to go see him. This is hardly a high-concept movie; the film's big joke is that Straight's only means of transportation is a power lawn mower almost as aged as he is. Chugging along on the two-lane blacktop with a trailer hooked up to the back, the vehicle is truly a bizarre sight. Straight's 600-mile odyssey to Mount Zion, Wisconsin, plays like a road movie for the '90s. On the trip, he both literally and spiritually traces the backbone of America, past a religious shrine and the oldest cemetery in the Midwest. This is the opposite of a high-speed chase; instead the world slows down. Along the way Alvin meets a cast of American originals. In an era of bad news and violence, it's refreshing to encounter decent people who welcome Alvin into their home and display nothing but kindness. The film is full of small epiphanies like a drink in a bar with another old-timer. There Alvin has his first beer in 40 years and the two men swap war stories. The immediacy of their horror after all this time is enough to give you the chills. As Alvin travels to meet his brother--and implicitly, his maker--The Straight Story remains remarkably upbeat. This is a man who has learned to "separate the wheat from the chaff and let the small things fall away." A film like this walks a fine line between real feelings and sentimentality. But the gleam in Farnsworth's eye and his wonderfully endearing presence keep it honest even when Lynch cheats a little. A fat neighbor sunning herself and eating Sno-balls on the lawn is a cheap shot from a different movie, and Spacek's performance with an odd speech impediment is misdirected. Lynch's worst mis-step, though, is his choice of actor for the brother. When Alvin finally arrives, whom does he find but Harry Dean Stanton--too young and jarringly familiar for this pivotal moment. Nevertheless, getting there is the real joy of The Straight Story. For Lynch, and the audience, it's a true leap of faith.