"The Story of Us": so sad and sweet, it's critic-proof

THERE ARE CERTAIN disadvantages to being a film critic. Seven years ago when I first got the idea I might like to do this someday, I had a notion that I would become "the people's" critic, just telling readers which movies were cool and ignoring all that artsy-fartsy stuff. Of course, something happens to you over six years of watching a movie or two a week -- you begin to recognize all the conventions, and the safer, popular films lose their sheen; grittier, daring independent fare is about all that really holds your attention anymore. Now, on many levels this is an advantage -- being able to appreciate such a wide variety of film languages has expanded my universe -- but the disadvantage is that I often find myself dissecting movies that I'm just meant to sit back and enjoy.

Most critics, judging from the reviews, found themselves dissecting "The Story of Us," Rob Reiner's newest romantic comedy, instead of enjoying it. And I'll concede to many of their points: the film rehashes to some degree Reiner's classic "When Harry Met Sally," Rita Wilson and Reiner have played their witty sidekick roles once too often, and the screenplay feels too rushed and repetitive. Yes, I noticed all those things too. But they didn't matter one bit to me -- I laughed anyway. I cried anyway.

Now, you have to understand that I'm not one to rate movies with "four hankies!" or the like. Typical "tearjerkers" might leave me a little misty-eyed, but very few movies have actually made me drop actual tears. (Only three others I remember -- "Jerry Maguire," "When a Man Loves a Woman," and "Titanic.") I suppose it's because they're so infrequent that I enjoy these moments. Or maybe it's because I'm breaking the rule that guys shouldn't cry. Or maybe because there's so much sadness in the newspapers in my community and there are so few chances to just let it all out. But it just feels cleansing somehow, like I'm renewed.

All right, back to the actual movie. Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer play a couple who have been married for 15 years and are on the verge of divorce who try separating for a summer while their kids are away at camp. This allows for a lot of relationship talk between each spouse and respective friends, a la Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher in "When Harry Met Sally." These scenes work the least well, mostly because Rob Reiner, Paul Reiser, and Rita Wilson all deliver their lines as if they were stand-up comics, when in fact they play literary agents and other such unfunny jobs. (Julie Hagerty, to her credit, comes off like a human being.) The film still manages to end up hilarious, since Willis and Pfeiffer have a brilliant comic timing down pat between them, and Willis takes some huge risks in making himself look goofy and they pay off.

What takes this picture to the next level, for me at least, is the careful dance between the two leads. Their flirtations seem like real flirtations, their arguments like real arguments, and their passion like real passion. And thanks to a nuanced script, the couple flows between each of these states almost imperceptibly, which just makes them feel like a real couple. It's heartbreaking to watch heated arguments rising out of loving banter, because you want to help them see the other person's perspective instead of just blindly attacking in retaliation. But what these scenes reveal to you, of course, is your own limited perspective of the world; they encourage you not to be so set in your ways that you can't even imagine what somebody else's experiences and personality and viewpoints might be.

The other element that captivated me in this film was a routine the family had called "high-low." At the dinner table each person would talk about their high point and low point of the day. Just for the heck of it, I've tried this out with Amanda the past few days, and it's actually quite fun. I wouldn't have necessarily guessed what she was going to say, and that helps me get to know her better. If this becomes a regular habit, then maybe out of all the movies I'll see this year the most important won't be the Oscar-winners but this one. How's that for subverting the film-critic mentality?

"Fight Club": put on your thinking cap, folks

WHAT MAKES A great movie? Most of the time I'd answer that question by falling back on the rote answers of great acting, great direction, great script. (Either that or a movie that just gets you rolling on the floor laughing.) But when I look back at a lot of my favorite movies, I see that most of them are idea-centered films, movies that make you think and question, films that make you want to grab a buddy and talk about it for hours, trying to sort it out.

"Fight Club" is one of these movies. It's a freight train of input on a collision course with your brain. It's a tornado of ideas. It flings philosophies at your mind with such speed that it will force you to reexamine yours. Love it or hate it (and believe me, critics are indeed driven to such extremes on this one), it's a movie that will shake you.

"Fight Club" follows a stuffed suit (Edward Norton) numbed by his consumerist lifestyle who, looking for some way to feel again, starts crashing support-group meetings and eventually hooks up with an anarchist (Brad Pitt) to start an underground bare-fisted fighting circle. It's one part dark comedy, one part coming-of-age story, one part science fiction, one part sociology textbook, one part generational metaphor -- the multifaceted construction makes the movie so hard to categorize, it's no wonder debates are running rampant over what the movie's trying to say.

Here's my take: At one point Pitt's character says we are spiritual beings: "Our generation has no Great War, no Great Depression. Our war is a spiritual war, and our depression is our lives." And the movie presents two popular ways that human beings have tried to numb their spiritual hunger. Norton's character drowns his spiritual longings with IKEA furniture and Starbucks coffee, buying into the American mentality that having enough stuff or the right stuff will satisfy. Pitt's character tries to numb his spiritual self by devaluing himself, his body, his life, his stuff, and other people with a kind of "nothing matters" nihilism. One is ruled by fear, the other has no hope. But out of the interaction of the two come fleeting glimpses that one can banish fear and still maintain hope. Certainly there is no character in the movie who embodies this idea, and you won't be able to quote a line from the movie that says this. It is revealed only by a meshing of the two characters' viewpoints, retaining Pitt's clarity of purpose with Norton's sense of decency.

Undoubtedly, others will walk away with a different interpretation of the movie. Author Chuck Palahniuk recently stated in an in-store reading that 99% of what he did was write down things that he heard other people say, and just try to cohere all the thoughts he heard stated by the people around him. So obviously there are people who will embrace these characters more than they should, and others who will hate the movie because they fear that people will embrace the characters more than they should. But that's fine with me -- this movie isn't a lecture, and part of what's fascinating about it is the wide variety of reactions. People disagree about every movie; at least with this one the reviews are talking more about the ideas in the movie than with the technical aspects. A debate and exploration of ideas is more interesting to me any day than one about whether Haley Joel Osmont deserves an Oscar nod.

So, with that in mind, let's explore some ideas. "Fight Club" is bursting with so many of them that they don't all even tie in with the main story, so I thought it would be more interesting to just look at three scenes from the movie that challenged or encouraged me:

1) There is one point where Pitt's character dismisses God. He says his own father abandoned him, so what does that say about God the Father?
A few weeks ago my pastor talked about the "Our Father" phrase in the Lord's prayer, and he explained how revolutionary it was to call God a father, who in the Old Testament was the king, the almighty, the judge, the creator. Suddenly the Jews were not just in God's kingdom, but God's family; God wasn't just their ruler but their benefactor. But today, as this scene demonstrates, the concept of God the Father isn't that attractive to a lot of people. With so many marriages ending in divorce, families are split up and fathers are often out of the picture. This scene made me wonder if perhaps it wouldn't be better to conceive of God again as our King, our Commander. It seems to me that nowadays people are looking to belong to something bigger than they are, and being part of God's family isn't that attractive -- families are small and unstable. But being part of God's kingdom, God's army -- maybe that would be attractive to people now. (Or maybe a new metaphor would be even better.) I just got this sudden flash later in the movie, when Pitt's character assembles an army to begin terrorizing the city, how cool it would be if a church organized like a small army and in the black of night snuck around and set bags of groceries on porches in a poor neighborhood. It made me wonder if a church like that would be attractive to people who would rather mobilize than listen to sermons on what they should do.

2) Pitt forces a store clerk at gunpoint to follow his dream of becoming a veterinarian.
As a guy who usually plays things safe, this scene spoke volumes to me. I am quite content to settle for less when I run into obstacles. I typically try to make do with whatever I'm given than to look for anything better. This scene asks what one thing you would do with your life if someone would kill you if you didn't accomplish it, what one thing you want your life to stand for. Although no one is actually holding a gun to your head, your life will amount to practically the same nothingness as being dead if you don't accomplish this one objective. Then, on Saturday night I went to hear Bill Hybels speak at Willow Creek and he challenged us with practically the same thing: Come up with a mission statement for your life. I thought about it and decided that my mission is "To look for God's hand in the everyday and help others see it." (That's similar to the mission statement of JoyOfMovies.com, if you haven't noticed.) Now the question is, am I going to go all out to accomplish that, or am I going to settle into my comfortable American lifestyle? Am I going to be afraid to leave what makes me unhappy, as actor Meat Loaf said about Norton's character? I hope this scene will stick with me long enough to encourage me when I'm tempted to settle for what I don't want.

3) Pitt and Norton board a bus and look at a Calvin Klein ad featuring a muscled, hairless model. And they just laugh at it.
I loved this scene. I usually hear only two opinions on highly sexualized magazine advertisements -- either a supportive "I'd love to be like that" from people I know or a lecture about how these images are harmful to self-esteem, blah, blah, blah. I fall somewhere in the middle; there's a part of me that wishes I looked like those models, but the realist in me knows I never will so I don't even bother trying. It wasn't any moral imperative that drove me to reject those images, just hard facts. The dismissive laughter in this scene made me understand, maybe for the first time, that I shouldn't even want to look like those models. Now, pretty typical for the movie, it doesn't mention what the ideal male should look like, but that's just as well. It allows me to imagine that what's ideal for me is all that should matter, that I need to strive for my goals and no one else's. And I think the principle extends even beyond appearances, but to my job, how much money I'm going to make, where I'm going to live, how much I'm willing to spend on stuff, how well I'm going to try to blend in with others. There are these unspoken assumptions people tend to make about the direction you're headed in; they believe I'm not there already because I'm young and just starting out. But I like having a small apartment, wearing my clothes until they fall apart, leaving the dent on the side of my car, working for a ministry, spending all my time with my wife. Those are where my priorities are right now, and although people assure me that those will all change, I sure hope not. I hope to still be able to laugh at the idealized American existence in ten years.

I could list another half-dozen scenes that either led me to consider something I'd never thought of before, or helped me to see how Christ can be such an answer to desperately hungry people. But I feel like I need to see the movie again before I can really cement all my reactions -- it moves so fast it's difficult to process all at once. So instead, let me leave you with some thought-provoking quotes I've scrounged up from the web and print media about this movie, which probably do a good job of fleshing out the film's nuances:

Edward Norton: "It reminded me of 'The Graduate.' My grandfather was very uncomfortable with 'The Graduate.' He thought it was negative and inappropriate. But my father loved it, thought it was a great metaphoric back comedy that dealt with his generation's feeling of disjointedness. And that's exactly what 'Fight Club' is. My character is sort of like Benjamin, and Brad's character is like a postmodern Mrs. Robinson."

From the movie: "You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis."

Director David Fincher: "For men today, there's an arid wasteland of information about how to live. Am I supposed to cry? Supposed to break something? Somebody just give me a hint. ... I don't think the idea behind Fight Club is a bad thing. I want to live life, experience it, taste it, know what that is. And I also want to be connected to other people who are feeling the same way, that this wall of possessions that makes me look like I'm part of society [isn't valid], that I'm part of this fraudulent kind of ideal of what I'm supposed to be."

Chuck Palahniuk: "I volunteer at a homeless shelter because I am terrified of the homeless. I work at a hospice taking care of dying patients because they scare the crap out of me. And a friend took me to her med-school lab so I could dissect cadavers. Until I walked into that room with those three dead bodies and cut their heads off, I was just terrified at the idea. By doing these things, I'm afraid so much less."

Helena Bonham Carter: "[Before meeting the director] I thought it could be very dangerous -- provocative for provocative's sake. About how men who feel emasculated need to prove themselves violently, physically, which I've always found faintly pathetic."

Meat Loaf: "It's not just a man's movie. Not by any stretch of the imagination. This movie is about fear, and it's about possessions owning you and the fear of losing those possessions because you're afraid to leave what makes you unhappy. And that is, I would say, 80 percent of the world, men, women, whatever."

Edward Norton: "This movie examines violence and the roots of frustration that are causing people to reach out for such radical solutions. And that's exactly the sort of discussion we should be having about our culture. Because a culture that doesn't examine its violence is a culture in denial, which is much more dangerous."

David Poland, TNT's Rough Cut: "Believe me, you'll be talking about this movie for a long, long time after you've seen it. You'll be thinking about the feel of knuckles crossing your face. You'll be thinking about everything you take for granted in your life. You'll be thinking about everything your pizza delivery guy might be taking for granted in his life. You'll be thinking about the people you love. You'll be thinking about why you were born and whether you'll have done everything you could have done if you were to die tomorrow. And most of all, you'll be a bit more awake than you were when you walked in the theater door."

"Random Hearts": the most unromantic movie ever made

LET ME PREFACE this review by saying that Harrison Ford is my favorite actor of all time. His rugged looks and vulnerable personality serve him well as an iconic hero like Han Solo or as a gutsy everyman like Richard Kimble; the guy would be captivating just reading the phone book.

But I think I would have preferred the phone book to "Random Hearts."

I hate to be disrespectful of Mr. Ford, but it seems like in the 4 years since he was named "Star of the Century" by NATO (that would be National Association of Theater Owners, not The North Atlantic Treaty Organization), he's been on a desperate mission to prove them wrong with a series of ill-advised romantic movies. There was the romantic comedy "Sabrina," which was very funny but not very romantic. (Were we really suppose to believe Linus and Sabrina would last more than a week together?) Then there was "Six Days, Seven Nights," which was neither romantic nor comedic. (Wouldn't Quinn have been in diapers before their kids were out of them?) And now there's "Random Hearts," which has been billed as a romantic mystery, which isn't the least bit mysterious and is downright UNROMANTIC. Bleech.

Harrison Ford plays William "Dutch" Van Den Broeck (which for some reason is not offensive to him, while I'm sure Antonio Banderas wouldn't stand for being nicknamed "Spanish"), a D.C. cop who finds out that his wife was cheating on him after she dies in a plane crash. (Hello, pathos.) Turns out his wife was cheating with the husband of congresswoman Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas), and in their grief and betrayal they turn to each other for support. Oh, and sex. (Eww.) And apparently I'm not the only one who thinks their relationship is kind of twisted -- the first time the two main characters kiss, the scene came so far out of left field that the audience tittered. And when I downloaded the above picture of Dutch and Kay kissing, the caption that accompanied it was "Caught in an upheaval of misplaced lust and rage, Dutch's and Kay's feelings culminate during a weekend getaway to his cabin." How could that possibly pull on the heart strings?

Now, it's possible that director Sydney Pollack never really intended the movie to be romantic -- perhaps that was cooked up by the marketing guys. Maybe his goal was to tell a story of loss and survival. (His own son was killed in a plane wreck in 1993.) In Entertainment Weekly, Pollack said, "We don't have a plot. We have fractional degrees of change in a relationship between two people," so his goal for the film must be less conventional than your average movie. I imagine that "Random Hearts" might work as excellent therapy for people who have gone through loss of that magnitude, did stupid things that they regretted, and took a long time to come to grips with the change in their life. (Psychologists have recently suggested that movies can really help patients -- see Gary Solomon's "The Motion Picture Prescription" and John and Jan Hesley's "Rent Two Films and Let's Talk in the Morning.")

Even assuming all that, however, I still found the film subpar. The reasons why can be found in Pollack's quote. Fractional degrees of change in a relationship is interesting only if the people are interesting -- and I never felt like I got to know either main character, despite the long (uninteresting) subplots each one had involving their career. And secondly, the lack of plot drains the movie of any dramatic tension -- Van Den Broeck's relentless investigation into his wife's affairs (excuse the pun) never really go anywhere, and the couple's slow path toward healing cheats us toward the end of the movie by jumping ahead several months, after dragging us through the weeks of torturous pain that moved so slowly it was almost like real time.

I hate to sound like I'm against tackling tough issues in a movie. I really don't mind angst, slow pacing, pain, restlessness, or minimalism. What I mind about "Random Hearts" is that it takes real-life issues and Hollywood-izes them with perfect lines, beautiful people, gorgeous settings -- the movie is so far removed from what we really experience in the day to day that I had a hard time staying focused on the characters' struggles and instead focused on what great acting Harrison Ford was pulling off. (During some of the duller scenes, I was also focused on Kristin Scott Thomas' complete butchery of an American accent, and Ford's incongruous earring.) This movie could have been so much better if it had been pulled off a little grittier, with characters who acted like real people -- who look awful in the morning, belch at inopportune times, and get tongue-tied when they try to explain themselves. I suppose I'm saying I'd have more empathy for characters in a movie called "Random Farts."

"Three Kings": Every Bullet Counts

IF IT WASN'T for all the Oscar buzz that's been surrounding "Three Kings," the first movie to take place entirely within the context of the Gulf War, I would have assumed that it impacted me so forcefully only because of my personal background. Since I'm 23 years old, the Gulf War is the only American war that I remember living through -- making the images and issues in the film much more powerful to me than the ones from the dozen Vietnam and WWII movies I've seen. But the fact that older audiences are finding the film remarkable suggests to me that this film has something to teach audiences about war that we haven't seen before.

"Three Kings" takes place in the first days after the cease-fire was declared in the Gulf War, March 1991. After finding a map showing the secret location of a stash of gold bars Iraq stole from Kuwait, a handful of soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze) decide to steal the gold back from Iraq and set themselves up for life. Things don't go quite as planned, of course, and the disaffected soldiers find themselves face to face with the plight of Iraqi freedom-fighters who are being slaughtered now that America has withdrawn from the war. What's most remarkable about the film, though, is that it has style to go along with its substance. There's a vein of humor that cuts across any solemnity, including blue-jeans-hoarding Iraqis and an exploding cow. There's a blurring of fiction and real life, like when Mark Wahlberg (the former Calvin Klein underwear model Marky Mark) is stripped down to his trademark skivvies, and when hip-hop rapper Ice Cube extols the virtues of easy listening. There are powerful dream sequences that show us first-hand what happens to a human body when hit by a bullet, and what it would be like for your wife and child to be killed during a bomb raid. All these stylistic flourishes are not just to show off, but to put you in the middle of the action, to give you a sense of the whip-fast pace, the dread, and the outright lunacy of war.

Still, you might be wondering, what does "Three Kings" have to say about war that we haven't seen before in "Saving Private Ryan," "Schindler's List," "Apocalypse Now," or "Platoon"? (Indeed, "Saving Private Ryan" marked the full transition of cinematic war from the rah-rah patriotism of the '40s and '50s to an admission of war's devastating chaos.) I'd have to say that what's new about "Three Kings" is that it shows the effects of every single bullet. I read in Newsweek that director David O. Russell kept saying "Every bullet counts" on the set ("a billion times," according to Clooney), and I think he got his wish. We get to see what a bullet does to the human body, what it does to families, what it does to ideals. If "Saving Private Ryan" made our jaw drop with the mass human loss of D-Day, "Three Kings" takes the time to tell the story of nearly every person who is shot. It puts the heroes, the villains, and the bystanders on the same plane and renders them all as human beings. I once heard someone say that war can take place only when you see your opponent as less than a full human being, and if that's so, then "Three Kings" works to erode the very heart of war.

The other thing that makes "Three Kings" so special is that it's the first film to really question America's actions in the Gulf War, and the first film to make audiences question their own responses to the war. Certainly this was even more powerful for me, who'd never had to question my own actions while watching a Vietnam or WWII film because I was never a part of those wars. And it's really easy to come along after the fact and say, "Well, we did a really good thing in shutting down Hitler," or "We really never should have become involved in Vietnam." Of course we believe this: One war we won, one we lost. (In fact, these conclusions are so sacred to the American public that Pat Buchanan seems to have killed any hope of becoming president by suggesting recently that maybe we shouldn't have become involved in WWII, and that Hitler was "an individual of great courage.") So before "Three Kings," I was never forced to question my own actions during a war, I've only been able to sit in judgment of others.

I have to admit that my past actions don't stand up too well under scrutiny. Perhaps I could blame it on the fact that in 1991 I'd never seen a movie about war, never really contemplated it before. Perhaps I could blame it on the fact that the whole country was hooked on patriotism, that we were enjoying having a clear-cut enemy like Saddam Hussein and a real chance at winning that we didn't have in Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps I could blame it CNN, which made the Gulf War the first fully televised war, made it seem like an entertainment miniseries. But I can't bring myself to do it. What I remember about my own actions during the war horrify me with their coldness and lack of compassion. I turned the war into a game of collecting -- I had three different newspapers' front pages from the day we declared war; I had two commemorative magazines detailing the entire campaign; I had 500 or so collectable cards with army vehicles, weapons, patch designs from each division, and military leaders like Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. These were all mixed in with my baseball cards, football magazines, and sports-page clippings -- in essence, I was pretending that the U.S. Army was my team and the Iraqis were the other team, and I was rooting for a Super-Bowl-size landslide victory.

I'd forgotten about most of this stuff until I saw "Three Kings" and was able to spend time with Iraqi citizens who had lost their homes, families, and businesses in our bombing raids. In America I was tying yellow ribbons 'round the old oak tree (well, actually, I was putting yellow-ribbon cling-ons on my windows) while people's lives were lying in devastation. I was debating whether or not America was in the Gulf because of Hussein's tyranny or because of our oil interests, but either way my mind was with only our troops. I was blind to casualties on the opposing side, or, even worse, probably cheered them. I want to go back in time and say to that boy I once was: "Only evil can come of war. We fight the war because we believe that we can prevent a greater evil from taking place, but we must enter this awful conflict with gravity and grief for those whose lives we ruin." But I'm not sure that I would listen to myself, not sure that I would be mature or experienced enough to understand what I was talking about. Our lives are long enough to learn what is required of us, as a character says in Stephen Lawhead's novel Taliesin. "Long enough to learn what we need to learn, but not long enough to change anything," agrees a second character. "That is our flaw. Each age must learn everything afresh." Which is why, I suppose, the movie industry will keep making movies about war no matter how many times that ground has been tread -- there will always be young people like me who are just setting foot there.

"American Beauty" and delight in the ordinary

"AMERICAN BEAUTY" is likely to be one of the most talked about movies this year. Just one year after Roberto Benigni's Holocaust fable that suggested that, despite the horror of the Holocaust, life is beautiful, comes the film debut of stage director Sam Mendes that suggests that life is beautiful because of the horror and randomness. Is it a movie of hope or a movie of nihilism? Are we supposed to laugh at who we are or cringe at who we are? Should these characters receive our condemnation or our pity?

My guess is that this film serves as a litmus test of who you are rather than putting forth any specific conclusion to absorb. The closest thing it makes to a value statement, I believe, is to assert that your attitude determines the way the world seems to you; I think "American Beauty" is purposefully vague about any other value judgments so that, ultimately, the way the movie seems to you also depends on your attitude. Pretty sly, eh? Those who are predisposed to see movies as instigators of flimsy morality will see this film as one of the worst offenders; those who believe that art can be a window into our spiritual selves will find the film one of the most illuminating.

"American Beauty" follows a very 1990s suburban family. Lester (Kevin Spacey), the father, is an emasculated man whose wife makes more money than him, who is considered expendable at a job he's worked at for 14 years, can't communicate with his teenage daughter, and in general has "never felt so ... sedated." Carolyn (Annette Bening), the mother, is just as distant from their daughter, is consumed with Martha Stewart-ish appearances of perfect, and an ambitious real-estate saleswoman who lapses into crying fits where she slaps herself and calls herself "weak!" Jane (Thora Birch), the daughter, is a sullen, disaffected teenager who hates her parents, her friends, her body ... well, pretty much everything. On the outside, they're the perfect American family with the white picket fence, but inside, they're rotting.

This premise isn't particularly novel. "Pleasantville" had a similar set-up -- soulless people leading pretty lives. But while the insipid "Pleasantville" suggested that pleasuring oneself (both in the sense of being selfish and in the sexual sense) was the path to wholeness, "American Beauty" finds Lester's turn toward selfishness and sexual obsession the destructive force it can be. Lester decides he's not going to play nice anymore, not keep up the appearances of happiness, and it only spins him into deeper peril. While "Pleasantville" extols the virtues of American individualism, "American Beauty" shows its ugliness. Of course, it also shows the ugliness of forced community, where everyone has to live behind masks, without honesty.

Certainly this could be seen as a kind of nihilism, a hopelessness. So could the lack of any upstanding characters -- the one with the most moral backbone is a peeping-Tom drug dealer, the next-door neighbor, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bently). But I don't think that's what the movie is saying. I think it's saying that all of humanity is flawed, that there's no perfect social system for us to co-exist in, that we cannot save ourselves ... BUT then it asks where we should turn. The answer comes in Ricky's peeping sessions, in which he videotapes the goings-on next door. The dull colors and grainy picture on videotape is in stark contrast to the lush colors and perfect lighting supplied in the rest of the film by legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall. With Carolyn's immaculate household de-emphasized by graininess, and with the sound of conversations often blocked out, the scenes become more generic, and thus more timeless. We see a father and daughter going through the arguments and emotions that fathers and daughters have been going through for centuries, and yet you're aware that you're seeing this particular scene the only time it is to be played. Compassion seems to leap out more readily for the blurry people on videotape than for the beautiful people in a perfect house. A plate of flying asparagus is more interesting than the vases full of perfect roses from Carolyn's garden. The wrinkled faces of Spacey and Bening, in which you can read years of experience and worry and joy and heartache, are more captivating than the youthful blandness of Lester's fantasy girl (Mena Suvari). The tension in this movie is between what is pretty and what is interesting, and for Ricky, it is in the interesting and unusual that he finds "the eye of God staring at him."

Everywhere in "American Beauty" there are contrasts between pretty appearances and naked beauty. An efficiency expert is brought into Lester's company to make the firings seem more diplomatic but "less honest," says Lester. Carolyn insists on putting on a perfect front when she attends a real-estate convention with her husband. Jane is saving up money to get breast implants, but later comes to see beauty in herself. Carolyn tries to convince potential buyers that a swimming pool can be "lagoon-like" instead of the cement hole that it is. Gorgeous fantasies in Lester's head turn into true beauty when played out in reality. Ricky finds Jane's ordinariness beautiful and finds Jane's beautiful friend ordinary.

Like I said at the outset, I believe this movie is a litmus test of sorts, because the reaction I had to the film is an art fan's reaction. While most of life is centered around putting on masks and erecting walls and making nice, art is about exposing life naked, being truthful about what we experience. The seed for this belief was probably planted in me by a great scene in Chaim Potok's novel "My Name Is Asher Lev." Asher's mother asks her artist-prodigy son to draw pretty, sweet things instead of "twisted shapes, swirling forms, in blacks and reds and grays." When she falls ill later the young Asher brings such a drawing to her:
"Here are the birds and flowers, Mama."
She blinked her eyes.
"I made the world pretty, Mama."
She turned her head away and closed her eyes.
"Mama, aren't you well now?"
She did not move.
"But I made the world pretty, Mama."
Still she did not move.

I think the real genius of "American Beauty" is that while it supports my interpretation, it doesn't necessarily preach it. The film does a good job of simply telling its story and letting the audience decide what to make out of it. The scene where Lester takes a job as a fast-food clerk may strike one person as a hilarious incongruity, another person as Lester's darkest and most selfish moment, and still another as an inspiring scene where Lester is unshackled from adult status symbols. When Lester throws asparagus against the wall and starts an argument with his wife, one person might see Lester's freedom to speak his mind, another might see him as having gone mental, and another might cringe in embarrassment for Jane at being caught in the middle. This is as far you can get from the clear-cut heroes-and-villains fare that most of us grew up with. By making no character someone to look up to and every character someone you can empathize with, "American Beauty" asks a lot more of you, asks you to come face to face with who you really are.