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It´s a very good film, bordering on excellence. And...

Posted by orejones on February 4, 2005 at 02:38:16

In Reply to: American Beauty posted by Mali on February 3, 2005 at 19:27:16:

1- No, Annette Benning is not overacting: just keep in mind (and the title of this film gives a good cue) that everybody in this film is not to be taken as an actual person, but as an archetypal character, the sum of all of them giving the director´s personal, and gritty, portrait of the average American bourgeois family, always showing us the other side of things, the gloom behind the bright colors. That calls for the players pushing the envelope in their acting, in order to give their characters a sharper, easier to recognize, profile..., same thing as in theater, where players always must talk close to shouting, and exaggerating their pronunciation, just to be sure that they are heard, and understood (and normal people don´t talk that way, do we...?)

2- Yes, Spacey is Spaceyish as he could ever be, perfect to give a distancing effect, enhancing the sense of perspective in the film: he reminded me of that character Gillis (William Holden) in "Sunset Boulevard" who, just at the start of the film, is shown to us dead, floating in that pool, shot by that old Hollywood glory (Swanson) who was forced by him to face the bitter truth, destroying that world of self-deception she had built around herself to avoid accepting her own decline.

3- Dead on the bull´s eye.

4- Slightly off the mark: this is a film built on a careful demolition of the deffense mechanisms its characters have built around themselves, the characters themselves being archetypes of today´s bourgeois society, as it happens in the US (and pretty much the same in almost every country, with just a few changes to get the local flavor...). And this girl was simply wrong in her perception of reality, and her slutty role was the wall behind which she used to protect herself: once she is pushed hard enough, that wall falls down, and she acceps how she actually is, and she can start growing up...

5- Dead wrong on this one, pal: have you ever heard of "fatigue of materials", that funny thing that happens when a solidly built structure is being beaten by repeated strikes, none of them strong enough to break it down... until, after a time, a small strike brings the whole structure down? The old saying "It was the last straw that broke the camel´s back" resumes it in a fine way... and that´s what happened to that hypersoldier, whose neatness, discipline, his rigidity..., all are integral parts of the shell he has been building to isolate and protect him from the unbearable fears his latent homosexuality bring on him: and the final strike that makes his house of cards fall down comes through his projection on his own son, whose behavior he is always trying to make sense of, always looking at it through his own eyes (never accepting his son as an independent human being...) and, when he sees him in the basement gym with Lester, he misinterpretes the situation and, from his own neurosis, he goes to meet Lester as a surrendering lover... and Lester´s rejection puts a clean mirror he is forced to look at, to find that the only homosexual there is he. He can´t bear the situation, goes for his very macho gun (oh, and how do gunlovers hate this scene...) and by shooting the messenger he tries to wipe the unbearable truth away.

This man had been accumulating pressure for most of his life, and never letting a release to it: small wonder then, that when the accumulated pressure reached a point, he was all blown up...

6- Yes, drug dealers usually behave in a smarter way. But these were not your usual drug dealers, but a disoriented (while very smart) kid punishing his father, and a man who was systematically breaking each and every chain in his life: Lester didn´t mind anything, and Ricky wanted his father to see him; while (and here the script is a masterly one) he never foresaw how his dad would misinterprete the situation, much less its tragic consequences...

And yes, I agree with you on this one being a great movie indeed. Only that those flaws you´ve pointed to aren´t such.

Regards

BF

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