Initial
American Beauty received overwhelming praise upon release, chiefly for Spacey, Mendes and Ball.[182] Variety reported that "no other 1999 movie has benefited from such universal raves."[183] It was the best-received title at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF),[154] where it won the People's Choice award after a ballot of the festival's audiences.[184] TIFF's director, Piers Handling, said, "American Beauty was the buzz of the festival, the film most talked-about."[185]
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 87% of 190 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critics' consensus reads: "Flawlessly cast and brimming with dark, acid wit, American Beauty is a smart, provocative high point of late '90s mainstream Hollywood film."[186] According to Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average score of 84 out of 100 based on 34 critics, the film received "universal acclaim".[187]
Writing in Variety, Todd McCarthy said the cast ensemble "could not be better"; he praised Spacey's "handling of innuendo, subtle sarcasm, and blunt talk" and the way he imbued Lester with "genuine feeling".[188] Janet Maslin in The New York Times said Spacey was at his "wittiest and most agile" to date.[189] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who awarded the film four out of four stars, singled Spacey out for successfully portraying a man who "does reckless and foolish things [but who] doesn't deceive himself".[190] Kevin Jackson of Sight & Sound said Spacey impressed in ways distinct from his previous performances, the most satisfying aspect being his portrayal of "both sap and hero".[120]
Writing in Film Quarterly, Gary Hentzi praised the actors,[191] but said that characters such as Carolyn and Col. Fitts were stereotypes.[192] Hentzi accused Mendes and Ball of identifying too readily with Jane and Ricky, saying the latter was their "fantasy figure"—a teenaged boy who's an absurdly wealthy artist able to "finance [his] own projects".[193] Hentzi said Angela was the most believable teenager, in particular with her "painfully familiar" attempts to "live up to an unworthy image of herself".[182] Maslin agreed that some characters were unoriginal, but said their detailed characterizations made them memorable.[189]
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said the actors coped "faultlessly" with what were difficult roles; he called Spacey's performance "the energy that drives the film", saying the actor commanded audience involvement despite Lester not always being sympathetic. "Against considerable odds, we do like [these characters]," Turan concluded. He stated that the film was layered, subversive, complex, and surprising, concluding it was "a hell of a picture".[194]
Maslin felt that Mendes directed with "terrific visual flair", saying his minimalist style balanced "the mordant and bright" and that he evoked the "delicate, eroticized power-playing vignettes" of his theater work.[189] Jackson said Mendes' theatrical roots rarely showed, and that the "most remarkable" aspect was that Spacey's performance did not overshadow the film. He said that Mendes worked the script's intricacies smoothly, to the ensemble's strengths, and staged the tonal shifts skillfully.[120] McCarthy believed American Beauty a "stunning card of introduction" for film débutantes Mendes and Ball. He said Mendes' "sure hand" was "as precise and controlled" as his theater work. McCarthy described Hall's involvement as fortunate for Mendes, as the cinematographer was "unsurpassed" at conveying the themes of a work.[188] Turan agreed that Mendes' choice of collaborators was "shrewd", naming Hall and Newman in particular. Turan suggested that American Beauty may have benefited from Mendes' inexperience, as his "anything's possible daring" made him attempt beats that more seasoned directors might have avoided. Turan felt that Mendes' accomplishment was to "capture and enhance [the] duality" of Ball's script—the simultaneously "caricatured ... and painfully real" characters.[194] Hentzi, while critical of many of Mendes and Ball's choices, admitted the film showed off their "considerable talents".[191]
Turan felt Ball's lack of constraint when writing the film was the reason for its uniqueness, in particular the script's subtle changes in tone.[194] McCarthy said the script was "as fresh and distinctive" as any of its American film contemporaries, and praised how it analyzed the characters while not compromising narrative pace. He called Ball's dialogue "tart" and said the characters—Carolyn excepted—were "deeply drawn". One other flaw, McCarthy said, was the revelation of Col. Fitts' homosexuality, which he said evoked "hoary Freudianism".[188] Jackson said the film transcended its clichéd setup to become a "wonderfully resourceful and sombre comedy". He said that even when the film played for sitcom laughs, it did so with "unexpected nuance".[120] Hentzi criticized how the film made a mystery of Lester's murder, believing it manipulative and simply a way of generating suspense.[191]
McCarthy praised the production and costume design, and said the soundtrack was good at creating "ironic counterpoint[s]" to the story.[188] Hentzi concluded that American Beauty was "vital but uneven"; he felt the film's examination of "the ways which teenagers and adults imagine each other's lives" was its best point, and that although Lester and Angela's dynamic was familiar, its romantic irony stood beside "the most enduring literary treatments" of the theme, such as Lolita. Nevertheless, Hentzi believed that the film's themes of materialism and conformity in American suburbia were "hackneyed".[182] McCarthy conceded that the setting was familiar, but said it merely provided the film with a "starting point" from which to tell its "subtle and acutely judged tale".[188] Maslin agreed; she said that while it "takes aim at targets that are none too fresh", and that the theme of nonconformity did not surprise, the film had its own "corrosive novelty".
Retrospective
A few months after the release of American Beauty, reports of a backlash appeared in the American press. In the years since the film's release, its critical regard has waned. A significant factor was its themes being seen as trivial after the September 11 attacks and the Great Recession of late 2007 to 2009.[195][196][197]
In 2005, Premiere named American Beauty as one of 20 "most overrated movies of all time."[198] Mendes accepted the inevitability of the critical reappraisal, saying in 2008, "I thought some of it was entirely justified—it was a little overpraised at the time."[197]
In 2017, allegations of sexual assault against actor Kevin Spacey surfaced at the height of the MeToo movement, including by men who were underage at the time of the allegations.[199] This led many critics and one of Spacey's accusers, actor Anthony Rapp, to find uncomfortable parallels between Spacey and Lester Burnham, his character in American Beauty.[200]
In 2019, on the twentieth anniversary of the film's release, The Huffington Post's Matthew Jacobs wrote that "the film's reputation has tumbled precipitously," adding, "Plenty of classics undergo cultural reappraisals [...] but few have turned into such a widespread punchline."[201]
In The Guardian, critic Guy Lodge wrote "the pushback against American Beauty in the intervening two decades has been swift and merciless – taking root well before Spacey's personal and professional downfall, though that certainly hasn't helped. Ask film critics of various ages about it now and you will tend to meet with a uniform sneer, along with a blanket dismissal of its cheap-shot picket-fence satire, its broad characterisation, its purportedly misogynistic view of career women, or its awestruck command of metaphor as flimsy and floaty as, well, a plastic bag dancing in the breeze." Lodge also stated, "You might hear grudging acknowledgement of its formal artistry, including the satin tactility of the late Conrad L Hall's cinematography, or the eerie, echo-y, endlessly imitated percussion of Thomas Newman's once-ubiquitous score. But that, too, is tempered with dismissiveness toward its makers."[202]
Similar to Matthew Jacobs' assessment, Stephanie Zacharek for Time wrote, "In 2019, beating up on Sam Mendes' multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty [...] is so painfully easy that it seems unfair. The Best Picture winner has fallen largely out of fashion; it rarely appears on critics' lists of favorite movies, and its memory seems to have faded for most moviegoers, too."[203] Zacharek concluded, "American Beauty is a movie about a privileged white guy who feels bad about himself and tries to rectify that by exploding his life—only to lose it all in the end. It's about a man who thought he had control, but didn't—and who can't, at the very least, relate to that? In the context of his own crisis of self-absorption, Lester Burnham couldn't see the real collision course looming ahead, a future of lost jobs and foreclosures, of madhouse doublespeak issuing from the mouths of people whose job it is to lead us, of wars that can't be won and thus keep being fought. Maybe it takes a look back at a ridiculous movie to show us how much we've really lost. Whatever Ball's 'authentic life' really is, you can bet it's not being lived on Instagram."[203]
Nonetheless, other critics still defend the artistic value of the film. In 2014, on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the movie, Entertainment Weekly's Ashley Fetters stated that American Beauty stands as "a classic, if not a masterpiece."[204] Guy Lodge acknowledged the film's flaws but admitted it still "turns out to be an exquisitely presented time capsule, a snapshot of middle-class, notionally liberal white society entering a spasm of panic at the turn of both the century and the Clinton era. Its satire isn't sophisticated, but it's pointed, identifiable, and still often cuttingly funny, emblematic of a tone of withering pre-millennial snark that has since been earnestly outmoded, and not for the wittier. It was never intended as straightforward drama, but as garish suburban burlesque: a distorted funhouse mirror reflection of America already at its ugliest, with its performances and petal-strewn visuals expertly heightened to match."[202] Lodge concluded, "Twenty years on, American Beauty isn't as clever as we thought it was, though it's inadvertently aged into a kind of wounded, embattled wisdom. Perhaps it's worth looking closer".[202]
In popular culture
The film was spoofed by the animated sitcom Family Guy,[201] the 2001 Todd Solondz film Storytelling, the teen movie spoof Not Another Teen Movie, and in the 2005 DreamWorks animated film Madagascar.[205]
