This week I’m thankful for our next film, Gladiator, which will be on the blog in a few days. Enjoy the holiday week, Everyone!

“We get a chance to see characters have experiences that make us feel that we’re not the only ones who have those feelings…We sort of have a collective admission when we see characters do those things that we do,” said Kevin Spacey in regard to what makes American Beauty, in which he stars as Lester Burnham, Oscar-worthy. What is not clear from the above quote is what American Beauty “experiences” Spacey thinks we all share. Cheating on one’s spouse? Neglecting one’s child? Lusting after underage girls? Wanting to kill someone? If we all “do” these things, as Spacey claims, then our society is in major trouble. But in its presentation of the sinister side of an “average” family, American Beauty sends the same message as Spacey, inviting its viewers to “look closer,” as one of the tag lines on its original poster says: Those whom we see around us everyday–family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc.–are not what they seem. What really lurks underneath sweet, suburban America and within its put-together people is sad and dark and utterly unattractive.

Superficially, the Burnhams, the film’s protagonist family, look good. Lester has a steady job and supports his family. His wife Carolyn devotes herself to caring for her roses and gives herself pep talks about her capabilities as a new real estate agent. Their daughter Jane is supposed to be the average teenager: embarrassed by her parents and hating the world.

However, it doesn’t take long for viewers to realize that the Burnhams only look good on the outside. In reality, they’re a mess. Lester sits in the backseat of the minivan while Carolyn drives Jane to school. He sits in silence at the dinner table, and no one will pass him the dish he asks for. His new boss is willing to ignore the moral indiscretions of some higher-up employees and instead lets Lester go. Lester’s life is listless, boring, meaningless. His wife and daughter have no use for him. He’s a nobody worth nothing. And no one cares. Carolyn is ridiculous. Although she believes she has social graces, she laughs like a hyena at everyone else’s comments in an effort to gain their approval and further her floundering career. She thinks only of herself and makes an effort to support Jane in her cheerleading merely because she thinks doing so will make her look like a good parent (opposed to actually being a good parent). As for Jane, she does drugs and hangs out with one friend, Angela, a girl who believes (and flaunts the supposed fact) that men can’t resist her and that the worst thing in the world is being ordinary. Jane’s new boyfriend Ricky is a voyeur, his father is abusive, and his mother is nearly catatonic.

Once Lester becomes obsessed with Angela and Carolyn embarks on an affair with Buddy Kane, the sleazy-but-successful real estate “king,” their family dynamic becomes even worse. Lester’s dreams of Angela inspire him to get physically fit, to speak up in the presence of his wife and daughter, to make friends with his neighbors–things that seem positive, but which are really just that much creepier when one remembers that his goal is only to sleep with Angela. Spoiler alert! When Angela finally offers herself to him sexually, Lester declines and becomes suddenly grateful for his wife and child, even though they appear not to care about him. He holds an old family picture fondly–and then he gets murdered.

The smidgen of gratitude we get from Lester at the end of the film becomes nearly a beautiful moment–he even dies with a smile on his face as he realizes the most important thing in his life isn’t the forbidden sexual gratification he could get from Angela, but the family he already has. Still, Lester’s murder eclipses the effect of his happy reverie on American Beauty‘s viewers and reminds us again of the evil lurking literally right next door. At the end of the film, though, appearances no longer matter as much. There’s no effort to cover up Lester’s killing so that everything still looks good. The result of all the concealed hatred, pain, and fear is there for all to see and attempt to deal with.

For Me Then…

It’s the roses. The title American Beauty most likely refers to a type of rose–the kind Carolyn Burnham grows all around her front yard, the kind whose petals are always present in Lester’s dreams of Angela. It is important that the flowers are (usually) vibrant and whole when associated with Carolyn and, in effect, dead and in pieces when seen with Angela. Through all the dark twists and turns of the film, Lester struggles to find meaning in his life. Once he lays eyes on Angela, he convinces himself that he has found something to live for. But when he is finally offered what he thinks will banish the emptiness inside him, he quickly sees that he is wrong about what really matters. Angela can only give him more of the same lifeless nothingness. Life and purpose are to be found with his wife and daughter. Seconds before he dies, Lester realizes it isn’t important that one live a flashy, spectacular life. A seemingly mundane life is exactly the opposite when one has people to love. And maybe, just maybe, American Beauty hints that knowing this love and practicing it can dispel some of the darkness inherent in flawed humanity.

American Beauty (1999; DreamWorks Pictures, Jinks/Cohen Company) is not my favorite film (by far), but it was released in an awfully interesting year. While some people lived it up at the end of the millennium (you know, “party[ing] like it’s 1999″…), 1999 certainly was not a time of complete merriment and celebration.

In January of that year, President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial commenced. After a five-week circus, the President was acquitted of charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. He said he was “‘profoundly sorry’ for the burden his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.”

On April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, two teenage boys shot to death 12 of their fellow students and 1 teacher before turning their weapons on themselves in what became known as the Columbine High School Massacre, still one of the deadliest school shootings on record.

And, of course, there was the dreaded Y2K, a.k.a. the Millennium Bug. According to many now-seemingly-paranoid people, Y2K was supposed to usher in the end of the world. The computer glitch would shut down everything from transportation and food shipments to banking institutions and military defense systems. But nothing much happened in the way of computers destroying the world.

If we can read into the above occurrences a bit, we find a fascinating–but deeply tragic–commonality: each of the incidents involves a facet of life with which we are all familiar, but one that has been twisted and darkened and corrupted. In the President’s case, we see a man–husband and father–tempted by another woman (or, in Clinton’s case, multiple women) and guilty of covering up his lust and infidelity. The wrong choices he made in his personal life affected his work life as well–and incidentally, the lives of all Americans. With regard to Columbine, we have young adults entering their place of learning–something they did every day–and destroying the illusion of safety we all felt in school prior to April 20, 1999. With regard to Y2K, I’m using a computer right now–as are millions and maybe billions of people–and the idea that something as simple as how a machine reads a date could wreck havoc on every system we know is horrifying and causes more than a little unease.

True to its times, American Beauty presents scenarios that we all consider relatively normal and reveals to its viewers the darkness that “the norm” can conceal. What appears to be an average American family living harmoniously in a peaceful suburb is in reality a disintegrated marriage between two neglectful parents, both of which would rather indulge their own lusts instead of involving themselves in the life of their lonely, misguided teenage daughter. The film channels 1980’s BP winner Ordinary People in its examination of hidden family issues, but it goes way beyond Ordinary People in its graphic sexuality. That’s where it loses me–even if its premise is relevant both in the year of its release and for us today.

American Beauty took home five Academy Awards for its eight nominations and nearly joined the rare group of films which have won the Big Five, falling short only in the Actress in a Leading Role category when Annette Bening was defeated by Hilary Swank of Boys Don’t Cry. The golden statues American Beauty received on Oscar night were for: Cinematography, Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen), Directing for Sam Mendes, Actor in a Leading Role for Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham, and Best Picture. In addition to Bening’s Best Actress category, the film failed to win Film Editing and Music (Original Score).

For more thoughts on American Beauty and its significance, please check out this weekend’s post!

Not surprisingly, Shakespeare in Love is a love story. Well actually, it starts out as a lust story. Will Shakespeare, struggling to distinguish himself in an Elizabethan London full of creative playwrights, suffers from a severe case of writer’s block. A quack apothecary/psychiatrist recommends Shakespeare seek a muse (i.e., a romantic/sexual partner) to remedy his writing problem. When his first choice of female inspiration and romantic attachment proves unfaithful to him, Shakespeare despairs of finding success in both his career and his love life. However, a chance encounter with the young and lovely Viola De Lesseps, who is obsessed with Shakespeare’s poetic writing, changes his mind. Viola, though, is anything but the typical high-class Elizabethan woman. She longs to act on the London stages (which is not permitted for women) and disguises herself as a man in order to win the part of Romeo in Shakespeare’s new play Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter. It doesn’t take long for Shakespeare to discover “Thomas Kent” is indeed his new crush Viola, and the pair swiftly embark on an affair. And so the film gives us, its viewers, several promiscuous sex scenes between its two protagonists and expects us to rejoice with them in the fact that they have found one another to enjoy and that their fornicating, such as it is, will also meet their greatest perceived needs: his for poetic inspiration and hers for poetry.

Ironically, while Shakespeare in Love relishes tawdry and unnecessary bedroom scenes, it can’t get away from also presenting its audience with legitimate issues of sexual identity, gender disparity, and social inequality. Shakespeare himself (the real, historical one) frequently dresses his female characters as males and vice versa; and while his heroes and heroines would not typically deign to marry too far outside of their social classes, he constantly portrays barriers to their love (parental feuding, distance, confused identities, etc.), sometimes for the purpose of added conflict and other times simply for comic effect. But Shakespeare in Love‘s romance between a man and a woman disguised as a man (Will and Viola’s first kiss occurs while she is in her Thomas Kent identity) blurs the lines between comedy and what the film wants to imply about sexual identity.

Rather than promoting homosexuality or transvestism, though, Shakespeare in Love opts to support the attraction between Shakespeare and “Thomas Kent” by emphasizing the desperation of women in a world in which they are commodities to be bartered and breeders of heirs. Despite the fact that the most powerful person in England at this time is Queen Elizabeth I, women are still objectified and treated as second-class citizens. Several times the Queen intimates that there are things that only a woman can know or do, implying that women hold value just as men do. Plus, oftentimes men are shown to be not as perceptive as women. The Duke of Wessex in particular is a blatant idiot who is easily duped by Viola and her nurse and frequently ridiculed by Queen Elizabeth. At the close of the play, as Queen Elizabeth heads to her carriage, she pauses before a large puddle, waiting for one of the crowd of courtly men to throw his cape on the ground to keep her dry. When the imbecilic men don’t recognize the problem or their duty to their sovereign, the impatient Queen marches through the puddle with an exasperated “Too late, too late” thrown back at her so-called admirers. This short, funny exchange seems to once more emphasize the stupidity of men who think the world–and women–exist merely to serve them.

In Viola’s case, her father, a wealthy man with an inferior background, trades her off as bride to the Duke of Wessex, a jerk who has a good name, a colony in Virginia, and no money. The barrier to the continuation of Shakespeare and Viola’s love affair, then, becomes “the river,” a symbolic representation of the distance between them socially and the fact that the world in which they live demands Viola do her duty to her family and marry Wessex. Thus, the comedy of Shakespeare in Love seems for much of the film to be, in fact, a tragedy. Although Shakespeare insists that “love knows nothing of rank or river bank,” he and Viola both know that their relationship is impossible, and there appears to be no viable alternative to the imminent parting of Shakespeare and his muse. Their love affair, passionate and sad, inspires Shakespeare to transform his comedy Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter into the beautiful and somber tragedy Romeo and Juliet.

As the couple’s romance comes to mirror the developing play, we the audience are led to feel sympathy for Shakespeare and Viola. However, as the characters themselves realize, their affair, while temporarily filling the voids in their lives, was ill-fated from the start. For one, it originated from impure motives–selfishness, not love motivates both Shakespeare and Viola in the beginning. Shakespeare needs to recapture his motivation and gift for writing or he will end up poorer yet and never be able to buy a share in the Chamberlain’s Men, and Viola wants her life to be full of poetry and not squashed by the constraints that come with being a woman in the sixteenth century. She later confesses to Will that she “loved a writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.” Likewise, Shakespeare also admits the foolishness of their affair–namely, because Viola has discovered he is already married–and (sort of) apologizes for wronging Viola. Both swear they don’t regret their relationship because they have come to truly love each other. But now the film couple and their audience have a bigger dilemma: dealing with the tragedy of broken love that should never have been allowed to sprout in the first place.

Spoiler alert! After the success of Romeo and Juliet‘s debut–with Shakespeare and Viola wowing the crowd as the title characters (this scene is actually pretty stellar)–and upon the Queen’s recognizing Shakespeare’s genius and Viola’s successful foyay into the male-dominated world of playacting, the deflated Lord Wessex humbly asks Her Majesty how all this (his wife’s loving another man, etc.) will end. Elizabeth replies, “As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey.” Their genders, stations in life, and time period force Shakespeare and Viola to part, but ironically the tragedy of their love morphs into a comedy (i.e., a story with a happy ending, not necessarily a humorous one). “You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die,” Will tells Viola. Inspired by the love he has experienced, he immediately commences writing his next play Twelfth Night with its heroine named Viola, a story that allows the real Viola to live (at least in Shakespeare’s mind and perhaps in reality) the free and adventurous life for which she longs.

For Me Then…

The best lines of Shakespeare in Love, in my opinion, come in the exchange between the hilarious Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose Theatre, and the moneylender Hugh Fennyman. When Fennyman panics after the Master of the Revels closes all the theatres, Henslowe reassures him: “Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” Fennyman, aghast, asks what they should do. Henslowe replies, “Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?” asks Fennyman. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery,” answers Henslowe. This is exactly what comedy is–apparent catastrophes or unworkable dilemmas resolving into the fulfillment and contentment of a good and satisfactory ending.

To me, the idea of things looking like doom and gloom but somehow working out in the end reminds me a lot of my experience with the Christian life. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Just how God works through everything to accomplish what is good for us is often a “mystery.” If you are like me, you probably think you know what you want out of life: what you should be doing, where you should be going (location-wise, job-wise…), how long it should take to reach certain life goals, etc. But God knows us better than we know ourselves, and He orchestrates our lives to perfection in order to bring glory to His name and to mold us into whom He wants us to be.

But the places between the low points of our lives when all seems dark and the times when we seem to be standing on mountaintops of victory can be awfully murky and rough. They require patience (that I usually don’t have) and faith (that I also don’t possess enough of)–faith that God knows what He’s doing and will “[work] for the good of those who love him” in His own perfect timing and way. How He does so is a mystery, but we who are believers can trust that our lives are comedies, and there will be a happy ending for us despite the difficult times we endure in this world.