American Beauty is a kind of Lolita for the new millennium, an imaginative look at contemporary American society. In director Sam Mendes's reappraisal of American mores, that American suburban scene is killingly dull—an oppressive miasma looms depleting the atmosphere of oxygen and covering those captive in its oppressive clouds with a deep layer of pain and angst. What American Beauty chronicles is a collective failure, both of energy and of spirit in American society. What has become defunct in our me-first, dot-com society is our capacity for wonder and our ability to conduct valid human interaction. What we now have, instead, is a tremendous vacuum and a collective longing that must be filled at any price.

The film has the New-Age flavor of people seeking desperately for meaning in their lives and for spiritual sustenance. American Beauty depicts middle-aged suburbanites Lester and Carolyn Burnhams' misguided attempts to exorcise this longing through extra-marital sexual liaisons. These desperate attempts to recapture love and security are obviously doomed from the start. Lester (Kevin Spacey) becomes infatuated with his daughter's beautiful friend, Angela, and Carolyn (Annette Bening) initiates an affair with fellow real estate agent Buddy Kane. These parallel quests to recapture what they have lost—Lester in pursuing the specious passion of youth, and Carolyn by imbibing the Lethe of her career and new love interest—create the dramatic tension of the film.

Lester is a walking dead man. This is not a spoiler; we learn this fact in the first few minutes of the film. The film comprises, then, a kind of retrospective of the dead, a look at what went wrong in Lester's life and marriage—and why. The film does not provide any useful answers for the audience, however, who, we assume, may very well be suffering in some degree the same problems that plagued Lester prior to his death. Any implied solutions are easily negated by the fact that Lester has little time to savor his new-found wisdom, for he is snuffed out, a victim of a cruel twist of fate. And this is not exactly a fair return for one's troubles. Given these considerations, it is difficult for me to believe that Lester especially wanted to die, after finally having solved his angst and his spiritual and sexual frustrations.

As we first see them, the once-happy couple live in not-so-quite desperation. In their thoughtless quest for a non-existent El Dorado, the couple's failure translates into the potent but amorphous sexual metaphors so evident in the film—Lester's obliterating desire for the young beauty that captures his eye with her perfect body gives the film its name, and Carolyn's heady lust for her professional superior is a violation of the martial bond. Carolyn's is the more prolonged and insidious quest, as it proves to be simply an excuse for a metaphorical sleep, in its own way as deadly as the sleep that has descended upon her new neighbor, Barbara Fitts (Allison Janney). But Carolyn's complex personality also provides a second metaphor for the ambiguous symbol of the rose. We see her happy and smiling only while she works in her garden, growing and cultivating that very American Beauty rose that becomes a perverted symbol of Lester's quest for lost youth and happiness.

Carolyn is not as aware as Lester that there is a deep emptiness in their lives. But she too seeks some value some thing in which to believe, and this becomes here career which soon subsumes all of her other passions and interests (except, perhaps her gardening). In an earlier decade she would have been a political radical, as Eric Hoffer terms it, a "true believer." She approaches her work as a real estate agent as if were a religion that will save her from the emptiness she feels in her life. One morning we see her compulsively cleaning a throughly dirty house she wishes to show later that day. She is almost frenzied in her effort, almost losing control at one point, until she cries her mantra, "Successful people project an aura of success." But mere capitalism, however decadent, is not to blame here.

Carolyn's priorities have been turned upside down; instead of serving cause, country, family, or mankind, she serves her own narrow vision of personal success. Since Lester does not share her unquestioning belief in the fruits of labor, she treats him as a loser, that most untouchable cast of American society. Lester, in denigrating work-a-day capitalism, represented by the magazine where he has labored for 14 years, denies the great Protestant ethic. As the Protestant ethic, or its modern equivalent, becomes Carolyn's world, its zeitgeist, Lester becomes for her a non-person, hardly worth her attention, much less her care. She feels that all of her efforts to maintain a seemingly happy suburban home are wasted on Lester. And if Lester is a non-person, how much more so is Jane, with whom she shares little except gender.

American males (and I am not exempting myself in this accusation) appear to be plagued by a fetish about certain female institutions: cheerleaders (because they remind us of our lost youth, Bruce Springstein's "Glory Days"), and young girls (the Lolita syndrome) for the same reason. Both are subconscious attempts to recapture our lost youth, a time when sex was a mysterious "potentiality" and sexuality still a potent, mythical force in our lives. If we wish to verify the truth of the Lolita syndrome, we only have to remind ourselves of the debacle on Long Island a half dozen years ago. The press sensationalized Amy Fisher (Joe Buttafuko's 16-year-old lover) as the "Long Island Lolita." She has recently been granted parole and is writing a book about her experiences. Perhaps we shall be seeing this book made into a picture by Hollywood?

But American Beauty is not a study in the maturation of the female teen, and in the end, unfortunately, Angela is still the clueless person she was at the beginning. It's hard to believe, and I see little (or no) evidence that any of the others in the film—Lester's wife, Carolyn; his daughter, Jane (Thora Birch); Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), his daughter's love interest; or Colonel Fitts, his temporary neighbor—learn anything positive from their experience. The film leaves us with no small hope, no subtle promise, that they will become better people. The thought of the colonel, with his deep-seated masculine identity problems, behind bars in some grim prison certainly gives one pause. Has Lester died in vain?

What I do remember in American Beauty as absolutely stunning is the remarkable, if painful to watch, acting job done by Chris Cooper as Colonel Fitts. (We remember Cooper fondly as the sheriff in John Sayles's Lone Star [1996] and his acting in Joe Johnston's brilliant film October Sky [1999], where his portrayal of a father unable to communicate with his son should have won him an Oscar.)

Peter Gallagher is absolutely wonderful as the egotistical real estate agent Buddy "King" Kane, on the make for money, sex, and fame. Why does Carolyn fall for such an obvious phony as Kane? He is a textbook case of the narcissistic personality. Even Kane's own, shallow, yuppie wife eventually leaves him because he is too "focused" on his career. That Carolyn initiates an affair with this creep by fanning his vanity is a comment on her state of mind and spirit. That she deludes herself into having wild, uninhibited sex with this self-promoting huckster proves that she has lost touch with reality. Those scenes were certainly not the highlights of the film; perhaps they were intended as comic relief?

Certainly the acting in the film is impeccable, even though I don't believe the film really deserved the Oscar as best picture. That honor, I believe, should have gone to N. Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense, in many ways a remarkable and intriguing film, with astonishingly good acting by Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis's best performance to date. (But then I also preferred 1998's Elizabeth to the relatively shallow Shakespeare In Love.) I say this about American Beauty primarily because, for me, the characters in the film lack appeal. It is very difficult to feel sympathy for or to empathize fully with anyone in the film, even Lester, though we certainly feel closer to him than to the others.

Ultimately, I believe this lack of a sympathetic focus is a serious flaw in the film. I don't think this was an intentional decision on the director's part; I suspect that this flaw stems from problems in the original screenplay. I also believe that Lester and Jane are intended to be sympathetic characters. It's important for the film's narrative structure that we at least be able to empathize, first of all, with Lester and then with Jane, or even Carolyn. And this just doesn't happen.

Many of society's trends are explored, such as the quest for identity, in the plight of the young lovers, Jane and Ricky. Identity (maturation, C. G. Jung's individuation) is a perennial problem for each new generation that must rediscover and redefine its cultural and psychic values anew. The problem of homosexuality is explored, in the tortured antics of Colonel Fitts, though not in the depth of Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry (1999).

The problems of perverse sexuality are, however, given a broad range. The question of incestuous desire is manifest by the nature of Lester's infatuation with Angela, who is, after all, the same age as Jane, and is her friend and confidant, and may be her doppelganger (or twin). The alluring vixenish Angela is a more guilt-free choice for Lester than Jane, his daughter.

For whatever reason, Lester's relationship with Jane has certainly deteriorated, along with his relationship with Carolyn. At one point, Jane says to Angela, with uncharacteristic sadness, that her father hardly looks at her any more. This certainly implies that at one time father and daughter did indeed have a more normal relationship, the kind of caring, loving bond that is important in a girl's life. So why has Lester abandoned Jane just as surely as he has abandoned Carolyn? Well, actually Carolyn has abandoned Lester, but then Lester has also stopped caring about anyone, except Angela and himself. Again we see the face of the narcissist, and a good argument could be made that all of the characters in American Beauty are, to one degree or another, all narcissists.

It is logical, natural, and even likely, that someone in Lester's place, who is not having sex with his wife, would turn to a surrogate. But for that surrogate to be so closely tied to his daughter is a little surprising. Surprising too is the fact that Lester falls so clumsily and profoundly in love with Angela, idealizing her to the point of fantasizing about her lying naked beneath layer upon layer of deep red rose petals.

What we see criticized in American Beauty is a hollow vision of material wealth and moral and spiritual complacency. Where once only the very rich, as portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderful novels, were constantly breaking things that society had to clean up after them, now it is the chief occupation of middle class America. We can no longer respond to that American Dream that nourished countless thousands of immigrants. All has grown outmoded, stale, and cliché. We can no longer evoke a sense of that enchanted land that Jay Gatsby recognized and saw in a blinding vision in his most lucid moment, "for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, . . . face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

The verdict is in, and we, along with Lester and Carolyn, have all lost our capacity to engender that magic spark and experience enchantment—and that is indeed a "grimm" reality. Compared with American Beauty, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita today looks positively old-fashioned. Lolita seems, in contrast to American Beauty, to be almost nostalgically American, and in some profound ways, a thing of great antiquity. If we compare the great media uproar over the original Kubrick film, released in 1962, the reaction of today's rather blasé audience to the explicit atmosphere of sexuality in American Beauty, repressed and otherwise, was rather tepid.

The imagery in American Beauty is very sensuous, very sexual, very seductive—almost oriental. It suggests the exotic, hints of the Muslim paradise, odors of perfume, sun-baked walls, and desert oasis. But is this the reality to which Lester aspires? Is Lester's quest not, more importantly, regaining Carolyn's love and respect which he has lost—in rekindling the fire and romance of his marriage, and recapturing the love and warmth that has somehow disappeared like escaping oxygen into the darkness of interstellar space? If not, then why do we have the two voice-overs, one at the beginning and one at the end, and what do they represent?

Presumably, had Lester lived, he would, with his newfound wisdom have been able to effect a reclamation of his heart, home, and family—the very things with which he is occupied immediately before the bullet takes him. Why else risk the inward journey if not to have something useful as a reward for your troubles, for having faced and tamed your personal demons and the monkey demons of Carolyn and Jane, into the bargain? To say that we find perfection only in death is a real cop-out. But that seems to be what Lester is saying—"I'm happy I'm dead, as you too, viewer, will also be sooner or later. So gather ye rose buds while ye may; make the most of life. Discover what jewels and pearls are within your grasp." One thing is certain. All of the characters in American Beauty would certainly agree with Voltaire, who wrote in his 1759 comic mock-epic, Candide, "We must cultivate our [rose] garden."

By the way, there is very interesting official Website for American Beauty: http://www.americanbeautymovie.com/english.htm. The site boasts a nice Flash Player 4 show with haunting music from the film. (Yes, the music really is quite haunting, if somewhat pretentious.) The Website may be a bit heavy-handed (or too artsy, not sure which one) with its manufactured symbolism. For example, a picture of Lester in a business suit is labeled "dead," while a picture of Lester as a dropout in a t-shirt is labeled "alive." For some reason, when I saw this, the phrase, "He was never so alive as when he was dead," started playing in the back of my mind.

This labeling of pictures is done for all the actors, and some of the labeling actually fits, as when we see Carolyn "sad" when doing the real estate agent bit and "happy" when gardening her roses. (Perhaps we do need reminding that there was a time when Carolyn really was happy.) Some of the labeling is less effective, however, as when a picture of Angela, the young nymphet, dancing as a cheerleader is labeled "brutal," and a picture of the dead bird that so fascinated Ricky is labeled "tender." What this is supposed to mean is not at all clear to me. Personally, I like looking at Mena Suvari more than the dead bird.

A picture of the peeper's mother (not much acting required there) is labeled "asleep" (perhaps "catatonic" is a better word), and the teenage peeper from next door is labeled "awake." I'm not sure how "awake" he is, but his hormones have certainly started kicking in. (I know whereof I speak, as a Dad with two teenage sons.)