AMERICAN BEAUTY--- A RED, RED ROSE

Victor Bloom MD

The movie starts with a peaceful appearing suburban home surrounded by many blooming red rose bushes and your standard white picket fence. The theme of American Beauty Rose repeats itself throughout the film, and as the film progresses, more and more we feel the sharp stick of the thorns.

The rose is the perfect symbol of this movie. The rose is beautiful, a pleasure to look at and symbolizes passion,www.thanwatchus.org but there are hidden thorns which can cause pain and bleeding. At first we see the beautiful Annette Benning, the perfect wife, mother and housekeeper collecting cuttings for a floral arrangement. She is smiley and happy like a Martha Stewart clone, and all seems right in this tiny corner of the world.

The theme of happy, secure suburban normalcy has been the basis of at least two other recent movies, "The Truman Show" and "Pleasantville." Somehow, Hollywood seems intent on showing us that suburban normality is anything but. Things are not what they appear on the surface. Underneath the surface patina, the public personna, are people living lives of quiet desperation.

Her husband is in the process of being coldly and ruthlessly fired. This momentous fact seems to wake him from his lethargy. He has to start thinking about plan B, and that includes long-repressed deep wishes for emotional freedom and sexual abandon. His romantic fantasies involve covering the beautiful object of his love with red rose petals. He is starry-eyed and lovesick, because he is a man whose marriage has grown stale and whose adventurousness has atrophied. He was disillusioned with life.

He is ripe for a classic midlife crisis. He had been so repressed and in denial, that he can hardly stay awake. Trying to be the good father, he goes to a high school basketball game to see his daughter do her routine as a cheerleader. Mother and father are desperately trying to do the right thing, to show an interest in their daughter, who wishes they didn't bother. But he looks beyond his daughter to her seductive and beautiful friend, a pretty girl who is depicted as seductive and bragging about her numerous sexual adventures with great attention to salacious details.

It quickly becomes obvious to his daughter that her dad is attracted to this, her special girlfriend, a fact that the teenager naturally regards as repulsive. The sexy one is quick to show her interest and wants to accelerate the process. It seems almost as if they are star-crossed lovers. The denouement of this 'romance' is gripping and stunning as the situation causes our hero to come to his senses.

Meanwhile, a new family had just moved next door, one with an odd high school boy with a penchant for recording everything with a modern camcorder. He has an eye for beauty and a poetic soul, but he appears weird. He is not like the other high school boys--- he is different. The daughter discovers that he is watching her from his window and recording her image. She doesn't know what to make of it. But eventually she is attracted to him, and he to her. The oddballs turn out to be the sanest individuals in this cast of disturbed characters.

The next door neighbor's obsession with video recording in "American Beauty" reminds one of "Sex, Lies and Videotape," in which the film-maker puts himself symbolically on the screen. He is ever-watching, ever-searching, endlessly curious about the world he lives in and the people who inhabit it, looking for darkness, looking for beauty.

Similar to the story line in "Eyes Wide Shut," which also shows that things are not what they appear, a sea change in personality is catalyzed by marijuana and alcohol. Somehow Hollywood saves screen time by having its protagonists undergo character development with the aid of grass, rather than a therapist.

The hero, the fired advertising executive, wants a simple job without any heavy responsibilities. If there is a divorce, he is entitled to alimony as she is the major breadwinner and he is unemployed. He works hard to be taken seriously in a McDonald's, as all he wants to do is flip hamburgers.

"You'll be flipping hamburgers" is the dread warning to those who do not make the grade or tow the mark. In this movie, flipping hamburgers is part of our hero's larger strategy for redemption. He is also intent on making a play for his daughter's sexy girlfriend when he discovers, flipping hamburgers for the drive-though window, that his beautiful wife is having an affair. She, apparently, is also jolted out of her complacency and discovers the joy and excitement of illicit sex.

Next door, the neighbors who have just moved in include the parents of the young man with the camcorder. The father is a retired Marine colonel and a secret Nazi-sympathizer. He makes 'The Great Santini' look like a guardian angel. His wife is zombie-like, having been reduced to catatonia, coping over time with the endless psychological brutalities of her husband. The son with the camcorder knows how to placate his father, by behaving like basic-training recuit---"yes, SIR! No, SIR!" But deep down he is a poet and philosopher and the camcorder is his instrument for capturing beauty and studying people.

This tragi-comic story is compelling, as we identify with the characters in different contexts and situations, and is a reminder that what you see is not necessarily what you get.

Dr Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the Wayne County Medical Society. He welcomes comments at his email address--- vbloom@comcast.net.