The summer between high school and university was a charmed period for me, all too brief but it seemed to stretch out forever. Really, it's not surprising that, when I look back, that time should seem rather indistinct and ungraspable - a fuzzy gold-tinged haze of dreams and potential. I miss those days...but I digress. One detail that I do recall is that I saw some great films over that summer: Being John Malkovich, Fight Club - and American Beauty.
I've since revisited those first two on the small screen, and in each case was severely disappointed, for they didn't seem anywhere near as good as I'd recollected (although neither of these subsequent viewings was at all under ideal circumstances), which may, on some level, have been part of the reason why I never got round to watching American Beauty again - I didn't expect to enjoy it another time around. A little while ago, though, the idea lodged in my head that it would be a good film with which to renew my acquaintance (pre-Ghost World, incidentally - it wasn't Thora Birch-inspired), and having just done that, it feels as if the film never went away, for American Beauty is still wonderful.
It's excruciating in places...the scene early in the film in which Carolyn, her back against the drawn blinds, dissolves into tears and then shrieks at herself in disgust was harrowing enough to have seared itself into my store of cultural reference points all those years ago, and it still makes me cringe, but the passing of time had caused me to forget how many other scenes in the film are just literally unbearable to watch - how painful and embarrassing they are. But it's all done in such a deadpan way - it's a small miracle that everything looks so flat (all the better to highlight the daubs of red which colour the sets from time to time) and yet feels so personal. And, yes, the beauty (such as it is) touched me...we're all looking for something, I suppose, and I'm not sure if I'm much closer now than I was five years ago. I may still be too young to really 'heart' a work like this (films like Ghost World and Lost In Translation feel a lot more personal to me), but it's still reached me, then and now, and it won't go away.
