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Critics Consensus: Flawlessly cast and brimming with dark, acid wit, American Beauty is a smart, provocative high point of late '90s mainstream Hollywood film.
Critic Consensus: Flawlessly cast and brimming with dark, acid wit, American Beauty is a smart, provocative high point of late '90s mainstream Hollywood film.
All Critics (184) | Top Critics (46) | Fresh (162) | Rotten (22) | DVD (16)
American Beauty is deeply disturbing, acerbically funny, brilliantly acted, breathtakingly original and highly sophisticated.
This is Spacey's best performance since he took home an Oscar for The Usual Suspects.
Why, then, did I enjoy it so little? Because of its unrelenting self-importance: American Beauty wants us to know, in every shot at every turn, just how clever and mercilessly cutting it is.
Kevin Spacey gives the performance of his life.
Alan Ball's script is a terrific piece of material, and Mendes responds directly to its subversive, provocative vision of a curdled American Dream.
American Beauty approaches a manic, almost cartoonish edge without falling over. Both Spacey and Bening use extraordinary comic timing to bring these very sad, lost characters to life.
American Beauty wields its title as a double-edged sword -- as a profoundly harsh and ironic assertion of misplaced values and wasted lives on one side; but as a subtle statement of hope and kindness on the other
We never really see the downtrodden nature of Burnham's life pre-awakening, we just take it as a given from Burnham's own sarcastic narration.
The highly entertaining dark comedy American Beauty uses its cardboard characters very well.
...magnificent, fresh, debatable, funny and tragicomic. [Full Review in Spanish]
A tightly coiled rage seethes beneath the pretty surface of American Beauty, a wickedly funny black comedy directed by newcomer Sam Mendes.
This seriocomic autopsy of middle-class virtue has the capacity to startle and surprise, and a gift for finding grim humor at the heart of tragedy.
Love this movie, it never seems dated.
Super Reviewer
Exceptionally quirky, entertainingly intelligent and witty and finally and importantly, stirringly poignant.
Lester Burnham is undergoing a serious midlife crisis; pining for his lost youth and obsessing over a teenage cheerleader, he's married to a joyless go-getter who encloses herself in an armour of sarcasm and self-help and has a daughter who he cannot communicate with and clearly hates his guts. Most of the laughs in this film are provided by Lester's social rebellion, but it's communication (or lack thereof) is what this wonderful film is all about. Full of people who feel suffocated by their own apparently meaningless lives, it's a story of ordinary people full of wants and needs but unable to express them because of the overwhelming feeling that they must do what is expected of them; they must at least APPEAR to be "normal". Lester's fantasies about the young girl are just projections of what he feels is missing from his life, just as his wife's desperate need for "success" are. The cast are all perfect, the multi-layered script sparkles with witty dialogue and it's full of memorable moments, culminating in a deeply moving, insightful and thought provoking finale. Genuinely beautiful.
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