It was March 2000, and everything was coming up roses for “American Beauty.”
There were the box office receipts (more than $350 million worldwide, not adjusted for inflation, against a budget of roughly $15 million, according to the data site Box Office Mojo). The rave reviews (“a hell of a picture,” Kenneth Turan wrote in The Los Angeles Times). The three Golden Globes.
“It was bizarre, because I expected it to be a little art house movie,” Alan Ball, who won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay, said in a recent phone conversation from his home in Los Angeles. “I think that’s all that any of us expected it to be.”
“I had no idea it was going to become what it became,” said Annette Bening, who played a materialistic wife in Ball’s satire about a suburban family whose father, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), quits his office job and becomes obsessed with his teenage daughter’s best friend.
Then, even more laurels: Five Oscars, including best picture, director (Sam Mendes), original screenplay (Ball), cinematography (Conrad L. Hall) and actor (Spacey).
“I’m a little bit overwhelmed,” a wide-eyed Mendes said in his acceptance speech, as he joined the ranks of Delbert Mann, Jerome Robbins, Robert Redford, James L. Brooks and Kevin Costner as the only filmmakers to win the academy’s top directing honor for their feature directorial debut.
“I had a flask in my pocket,” Ball said, recalling the moment. “That was the only way I could kind of deal with it.”
Critics agreed that the film was a refreshing break from the typical high-concept Hollywood movie mold: After a decade dominated by period dramas like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Titanic,” it represented a triumph for riskier filmmaking. In an age of prosperity, when unemployment in America hovered around 4 percent, the movie served as an outlet for the malaise of middle-class suburbanites unfulfilled by their comfy jobs and gorgeous houses in affluent neighborhoods.
“It was kind of a trope to talk about the hidden underbelly, like, ‘Oh, people aren’t actually happy with perfect lives, they’re actually secretly dissatisfied,’” said Gabriel Rossman, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research addresses culture and mass media.
So when you look on a list of the 100 greatest films of the 1990s, you’d expect to find “American Beauty” … first, fourth, 10th?
Absent?
In the context of the modern era — post-9/11, post-economic crash, amid political upheaval — beating up on the film “is so painfully easy that it seems unfair,” the film critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote in Time in 2019.
So what happened?
“I think the culture decided that it was an ‘important’ movie, despite the fact that it was made for less than $15 million by a young studio in the same spirit as an independent film,” Mendes wrote in an email. “It was freighted with all that awards stuff, and so the only place it could travel after that was towards backlash.”
Of course, there is another glaring factor: Spacey’s fall from grace after being accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen men and teenage boys dating back 20 years — he was acquitted of sexual assault charges in 2023 — that made the 42-year-old Lester’s lust for the 17-year-old Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari) look no longer daring or edgy but, well, icky.
That was certainly part of it, said Chris Cagle, an associate professor of film history and theory at Temple University in Philadelphia, but the shift in critical opinion began well before the lawsuits.
“Oscar movies often are seen as kind of middlebrow,” he said. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing — middlebrow could just be a way in which a mass-market movie is able to do something different, expansive or experimental — but nonetheless, middlebrow films tend to maybe get derision from people who see them as gauche or dated.”
Movie opinions don’t necessarily match up with the politics or economics of a time period, but those elements can be a factor. And in September 1999, when DreamWorks released the film in theaters in the United States, that climate was boom times. The economy was thriving. Employment was plentiful.
To put it simply: It’s much easier to indulge a fantasy of quitting your job when you have a job to quit.
Which meant a film about giving in to your urges — to ditch your dead-end office gig, to cheat on your spouse, to run away from your weird, embarrassing parents — hit the spot.
“Everybody had a way in,” said Dan Jinks, a producer on the film.
So when terrorists crashed a pair of planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001 — and the markets subsequently plunged into a yearslong recession after the 2008 financial crisis — the film experienced a rapid fall from the grace.
Suddenly, a man complaining about his boringly perfect life and office job seemed rather quaint.
Mendes said that, in the wake of the attack, he too re-evaluated his work.
“For at least a decade after 9/11, I was embarrassed by how much of the movie felt self-satisfied — a form of navel-gazing,” he said.
Then came the #MeToo movement in 2017 and a culture-wide reorientation around the way we view sexual assault.
The 17-year-old Angela character who seemed so sexually liberated in 1999? Now, amid a more nuanced understanding of sexual abuse, it is clear that, though she presented herself as confident and in control, she was being taken advantage of.
Another factor: a growing acceptance of homosexuality, with Vermont becoming the first state to legalize civil unions in 1999 and the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage across the country in 2015.
In his Oscars acceptance speech for best picture, Jinks asserted that homophobia was among the serious issues the film “dealt with,” referring to the fact that the Burnhams’ virulently homophobic neighbor, Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper), turns out to be a gay man. But nowadays, a contributor to the feminist film criticism blog Screen Queens wrote, the bar for onscreen representation of L.G.B.T.Q. characters is far higher.
“The homophobe-is-secretly-gay trope has been done to death and we’ve all finally realised recently that it is actually, in itself, extremely homophobic,” reads the less-than-rosy reappraisal, which was published in 2020.
But not all re-evaluation has been negative.
In a 2019 retrospective in The Guardian for the movie’s 20th anniversary, the critic Guy Lodge acknowledged the film’s shortcomings but wrote that “American Beauty,” with its “pristinely art-directed yin-yang of sadness and sarcasm,” was worth a closer look.
“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,” he wrote.
Mendes had a similar epiphany when he rewatched the film with his children more than a decade after its release.
“They pointed out to me what a profoundly weird and unusual movie it is,” he said. “It’s such a strange combination of different viewpoints and aesthetics — American and European, gay and straight, comic and serious, poetic and cartoony.
“I still like it a lot,” he added, “but it feels very linked to the person I was in the ’90s.”