American Beauty is Bad for your Soul

  The 1990s was a relatively stable period of time in American history. We weren’t scared of the communists or the nuclear bomb, and social unrest for the most part took the decade off. The white-picket fence ideal was as accessible as it had ever been for most Americans. Domesticity was commonplace, mundane even, and we had time to think about things like the superficiality of modern living. It's in an environment like this that a movie like Sam Mendes' 1999 film American Beauty can not only be made but also find overwhelming success.

In 1999 this film was praised for its bold and honest insight into American suburban life. The Detroit News Film Critic called this film “a rare and felicitous movie that brings together a writer, director and company perfectly matched in intelligence and sense of purpose” and Variety hailed it as “a real American original.” The film premiered to only a select number of screens, but upon its smashing success was upgraded to a wide release where it continued to rake in the revenue. The movie took the yellow brick road to the Oscars where it won five golden statues including Best Picture.

Over twenty years later, though, American Beauty, is one of many films undergoing a critical reevaluation. In 2019 Time called it “one of the most laughably square movies about the destructiveness of conformity ever made.” The Huffington Post called it “retrograde hooey.” It’s by no means universally hated—it’s still #76 on IMDb’s Top movies as of this writing—but the protective bubble around the movie has popped. 

I don’t agree with all the retroactive retypings of old movies that we’re seeing today, (no I will not be detailing which movies in specific) but I stand by this film’s long overdue reevaluation. Unlike a movie such as The King and I, I feel we always had the critical tools to understand American Beauty's sore spots because it's a lot simpler than just a generational gap: the mainstream film world has always had the tools discuss why a film like American Beauty is, charitably, overrated.

    There are elements of the film's craft that we could potentially dig into. For a film that won best original screenplay in its year, the dialogue dips into juvenility a little too often. Here's a film where a forty-two-year-old speaks almost exclusively in mic drops. Like a lot of what's wrong with this movie, this tends to elicit justifications that "Oh, but it's satire!" but satire is supposed to be illuminating. And I'm not sure what kind of revelation we're supposed to have over our main character complaining about having to masturbate in the shower.

But what makes this film so intolerable isn't really even rooted in poor design or plotting. American Beauty congratulates itself on its exposé of the rotten core beneath the prim exterior of domesticity, but ultimately finds itself a victim of the spiteful eye it employs. Nothing this movie unearths about modern living is as repugnant as the disdainful metric with which it measures the world.

Succinct Introduction
  

In American Beauty, the Burnhams--father Lester, mother Carolyn, and daughter Jane--are a standard American suburban family. So naturally, they are all miserable and hate each other. The story is told from the perspective of Lester (Kevin Spacey), who is reflecting on the last year of his life after his murder. Lester's monotonous existence, largely a product of his loveless marriage to Carolyn (Annette Benning), gets a jolt when he becomes obsessed with Angela (Mena Suvari), best friend of his teenage daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), after seeing her perform a cheerleading routine with his daughter at a school event.

Realizing that he has it in him to be aroused by a fertile young woman energizes Lester and gives him the confidence to take control of his life. This leads to him quitting his job and blackmailing his boss, taking up a “least amount of responsibility possible” job at a fast-food joint, buying the set of wheels he wanted as a teen, and buying drugs from his teenage neighbor, Ricky (Wes Bentley), who is also showing romantic interest in Jane, much to Angela's fury.

As Lester grows more restless he starts to push back against Carolyn's controlling grip. She retaliates by having an affair with her business rival until he takes that away from her too after he discovers the affair, and her lover ends the relationship fearing an expensive divorce. All the while, Jane takes a romantic interest in Ricky while Ricky dodges bullets to not set off his disciplinarian father, Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper).

When the Colonel misinterprets a drug deal between Lester and Ricky, he assumes that Ricky is sexually involved with Lester and threatens to throw his son out. Ricky feeds his abusive father’s paranoia, forcing him to make good on his threat and Ricky leaves without looking back. After Ricky has gone, the Colonel seeks out Lester and makes advances on Lester himself, his own repressed homosexuality revealed. When Lester rebuffs him, the Colonel leaves ashamed.

In the film’s climax, a desperate-for-validation Angela offers herself to Lester, but Lester backs out after Angela confesses she is actually a virgin. He ends the film not as Angela’s lover but as a supportive father figure. Lester reflects on how good his life actually is just as the Colonel sneaks up from behind him and shoots him in the head. From beyond the grave, Lester tells the audience “I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world ...”

Much of the movie’s fall from exaltation comes from a post-millennium irritation with this movie’s ennui over the plight of affluence. 9/11 reminded America that there are things much more worthy of our anger than boredom, and Lester’s disdain for a paid-off house and a steady job felt less tolerable for a post-recession audience. There’s something to those perspectives, but I think that the core of the movie’s thesis, that of finding true beauty in a world obsessed with appearances, is fairly universal. Moreover, American Beauty could not have known how differently we would define stability in just a few short years. No one can predict the future (hello from quarantine). We can only punish the movie so much for its lack of peripheral vision. The movie's real sins were much more readily on display.

    There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the American Beauty's base directive. Blending a malaise for the game of American suburbia with the natural bitterness that emerges within family dynamics is a ripe recipe for drama and even insight. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has a very similar set-up, and the character interactions are filled with possibly even more rancor than those in American Beauty, but it's still a much easier film to swallow for a number of reasons. The characters in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are all self-pitying and vile, but the reasons for their disdainful behavior are rooted less in boredom or ego and more in the genuine resentment that festers in the neglect and repression inherent in the game of capitalism, a game where the only goal is to have the biggest house on the block, whatever the cost to your relationships and loved ones. American Beauty fails to measure up to a film like this owing to its careless handling of its characters and themes.

    But before we get into that, we ought to address what is probably the biggest gripe against American Beauty in a post-#metoo era. Much of this movie's most recent discourse has centered around how gross it feels to watch this movie in light of the allegations against Spacey. Sometimes you learn something about the players involved in the making of a movie that irreparably alters your context for said movie, and there's a conversation to be had there. But debating whether or not the offending storyline is gross with the context of Kevin Spacey's child molestation tiptoes around a deeper truth: the storyline is gross on its own too.

Lusty Lester

   Yes, many, many other voices in film discussion have talked plenty about the ickiness of Lester Burnham’s recurring sexual fantasies about a high-schooler, especially after the allegations against Spacey, and I am only the latest to join the conversation, but as it is a central tenant of the film, it needs be addressed. Fair warning, we’re going to talk a little about pedophilia and sexual abuse. I hope to do so tactfully, but if that’s a sensitive subject for you, I’ll catch you in the next section.

    Common defenses for this plotline often sound something like, “But it’s not like he actually has sex with her. Besides, you can’t always help these things. It’s just biology for a sexually driven man to be drawn to an attractive girl. Why so puritanical?” In fairness, there’s a truth to the idea that a basic animal part of the brain, regardless of our moral convictions on the matter, lights up when exposed to something stimulating. But that still misses what’s so disturbing about how Lester’s lust is presented in this film. It’s not that he is afflicted with this sexual desire and now has to deal with it, but that he feels no qualms about it. At all. 

There’s not a moment where Lester realizes he’s drawn to a minor, thinks to himself “what the cruddy do I do now?” and tries to address those feelings responsibly. He immediately jumps into overt flirtation and breaking into his daughter's contact book for her phone number. Overhearing Angela say that she might have sex with him if he just worked out causes him to throw himself into shaping up. Perhaps Lester couldn’t help but be attracted to Angela, but no one was forcing him to fantasize about giving Angela a bath.

Even that Lester does not consummate his attraction just cashes in on a resolution it did not build up to, which makes the whole reversal seem very insincere, obligatory. Lester has not spent the last two hours of screen time learning to see Angela (or anyone for that matter) as a human being who doesn’t just exist to service his appetites. We have felt no conflict in Lester about this matter, so his change of heart follows no logical progression of his character. It's there so we don’t feel bad about spending two hours in his slimy head. 

Upon release, this core plotline was acknowledged as pushing the boundaries but doing so within the acceptable range of “but what if?” But time has suggested even that’s burying our heads in the sand. From the Huffington Post’s retrospective: 

“When actor Anthony Rapp accused Spacey of sexually harassing him at age 14, the Lester Burnham parallels were glaring. And when other Hollywood men were exposed as power-hungry deviants who preyed on young women, the image of Angela as one guy’s private reverie became a token of unchecked ghoulishness. Art faded to artifice.”

   What this movie doesn’t seem to understand is that there are ways to gracefully depict uncomfortable parts of reality on film, including pedophilia and its surrounding territories.

    1996's Beautiful Girls has a similar plotline with the main character's midlife crisis (well, quarter-life crisis in this film), which has him becoming infatuated with his thirteen-year-old neighbor. This plotline hits on some of the same beats as the Lester-Angela line from American Beauty, but it does so much more responsibly. The film sees its main character sort of retreating into the promise of youth offered by a much younger romantic alternative, and she in turn feels validated at having earned the attention of an older figure, but Timothy Hutton never leverages that to take advantage of Natalie Portman, who was only fifteen when this movie released. The movie frames this whole scenario as him not mindfully addressing his own insecurities of growing up and settling down. The film ends with them deciding to play their relationship more or less as pen pals, having never consummated their interest beyond a platonic kiss on the cheek at the very end. As with American Beauty, Timothy Hutton's final resting place is more of a supportive adult presence, similar to Lester at the end of the film, but his road getting there is much less repulsive.

    The 2004 film The Woodsman is actually about a former child molester. This film follows Walter after he is released from prison for molesting little girls, and the story follows him trying to reintegrate into society all while battling his internal demons. This movie challenges the viewer to sympathize with a person who has done an awful thing, but in a clear “love the sinner, but definitely hate the sin” kind of way.

Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman

Where Lester nurtures his lust for Angela, Walter is at war with himself over his attraction, not only because giving in would land him back in prison but also because Walter knows how indulging himself would leave irreparable scars on another human being. In short, we feel immense sympathy for Walter without condoning him acting on or entertaining his appetites. Had Lester shown a particle of the conflict seen in someone like Walter, modern discussion on American Beauty would look very different.

    Perhaps the one thing that separates both The Woodsman and Beautiful Girls from American Beauty is the vantage point that audiences are placed in. There are multiple sequences in the American Beauty that have Lester imagining Angela as his private plaything. The most infamous of these has her rolling around naked in a bed of rose petals, treating the audience to images of an underage girl in a compromising situation. It's hard to argue that the film doesn't endorse Lester's transgression when it asks the audience if they want in on it too. Neither Beautiful Girls nor The Woodsman do this. They represent the uncomfortable reality of their characters' situations without carving out a space for the perverted audience to indulge in the very sins it reports to be condemning. American Beauty could have done the same if it had wanted to.

I wish I could say this was just a problem with how the film writes Lester, but while he’s definitely the fulcrum of this movie’s dangerous game, he is far from the only problematic character.

No One in this Movie has a Character Arc

    It is a somewhat fallacious idea that characters in a film must be likeable or even grow past their shortcomings. Making your character repellant can illuminate contradictions within society or even the viewer. That is the basis of things like satire or dark comedy, and also something along the lines of Nightcrawler, a movie about a photojournalist who goes to extremely unethical lengths to capture raw footage for a news outlet which will surely net higher ratings. The whole exercise reveals how our inherent fascination for the perverse and disturbing paints over a lot of things, such that we don't really care how anyone collected such material, and maybe that's something we should think about.

    But this comes with the dual responsibility of framing your character in such a way that doesn't have your audience taking away the wrong lessons. This is a very difficult thing to pull off because you can't really control how your audience is going to respond to your film.

    But the characters in American Beauty are at their best, bland, and at their worst, repulsive, yet they are all framed by the film as misunderstood idealists or victims in a world that just does not understand them. That is the difference between a movie like Nightcrawler and American Beauty: you are not supposed to cheer for Jake Gyllenhal in Nightcrawler, but for some reason, you are supposed to cheer for basically every character here.

   Ricky is a Creep

   Unlike every other character, Ricky is not attracted to things of superficial beauty, as demonstrated by his Ode to Plastic Bag. This in theory puts him in a position to help the Burnhams open their eyes to a more authentic form of beauty. But Ricky can’t help them because at the end of the day he’s just another nut.

The film has a clear destination it wants to take the audience by its conclusion as evidenced by Lester's closing narration, but if they were wanting Ricky to guide the audience to that conclusion (and I have to assume they were, he has no purpose otherwise) they let us all down.

    Let’s first take stock of the things the script says are beautiful in Lester’s closing narration: holding your grandmother’s hand, shooting stars, children laughing, autumn leaves. These are perfectly normal things to find beauty in, and could reasonably inspire a spiritual awakening in a person. Let’s now compare them to the things Ricky finds beautiful: plastic bags in the wind, dead birds, dead homeless people, people in their bedrooms. There is no overlap between the two, so the film admits that Ricky’s insights on true beauty are probably just residue from one too many cannabis trips, and his habit of video taping people without their permission just feels like an extension of Lester's voyeurism problem.

There’s an unwritten rule that the more you want your character to function as a stand-in for your audience the more accessible he or she must be to your audience. The character can have quirks, but the viewer shouldn’t have to work this hard to see things the way Ricky does. The script as is assumes that the audience will hear Ricky talking about seeing God in the eyes of a homeless man frozen to death and think, “I know exactly what he’s talking about! Totally normal!”

    Jane is Thoroughly Ordinary

Jane is a microcosm of the movie’s larger problem, empowering the audience with a rebellious power trip that is both meaningless and unearned. The tragic irony of Jane Burnham is that her entire “arc” revolves around her feeling like a non-entity in her own life, yet by the end of the film she still doesn’t know who she is, she just knows who she isn’t.

    When she’s not complaining about her parents, Jane spends most of the time as Angela’s rug. Angela’s boasts continually remind Jane that she is less desirable than her. Jane’s interest in the weird boy next door Ricky is framed as a means of rebelling against Angela’s grip over her life. When Ricky eventually asks Jane to run away with him, Angela again tries to keep Jane underfoot, this time by calling Ricky a freak. Jane then throws this in Angela’s face: “Then so am I! And we'll always be freaks and we'll never be like other people and you'll never be a freak because you're just too perfect!”

    Calling out Angela’s flawless veneer as a sign of her unoriginality is framed as Jane’s culminating “This Is Me” moment, but what do we really know about Jane? She has self-image problems (like every teenage girl), she hates her parents (like every teenage girl), she’s into the weird boy next door (never seen that before) . . . And that’s about it. On what grounds does she knight herself the title of freak? Does she even have like a secret stash of Pokemon cards that she hides from Angela? We’re in the final minutes of the movie, and she has no defining attributes except that she’s “not ordinary.” 

This is also revealing in how the film views Angela, who is framed as deserving of this smackdown. Jane is free to call out Angela’s artificiality despite having no defining qualities herself because in this film tearing someone down for not being something is more worthwhile than actually exploring what that something is. If Jane’s “arc” resonates, it’s only because the writers were counting on two things: one, the audience projecting itself onto her blank slate, and two, the audience being so caught up in the satisfaction of calling Angela a fake that it won’t look too closely at Jane’s own paper-thin characterization. By simply using Jane as a counter for Angela, the film denies Jane any identity of her own. 

Lester and Carolyn Deserve Each Other

    In addition to being a shameless pedophile, Lester is also a selfish jerk who wallows in his own boredom and feels justified at humiliating his entire family in the name of self-respect. In his defense(?) Carolyn is a vapid show-off who cares more about her freshly tailored lawn than the emotional well-being of her husband, whom she verbally emasculates in front of him and her coworkers, or her daughter, whom she body-shames.

    In this world, being bored is just grounds for raking your spouse over the coals. Carolyn reduces Lester to a voiceless ragdoll, and Lester makes reckless expenditures just to spite her. As the tension escalates, Lester returns her verbal abuse and Carolyn has an affair with her business rival. Lester and Carolyn are constantly positioned as each other’s greatest enemies. The problem is they’re both just such rotten people that you’re not really rooting for either of them to overcome the other, but you’re also not rooting for them to reconcile, so you just wonder why you're even bothering with these two. 

    This is maybe less a problem for Carolyn who is framed as being unlikeable from very early on, though this also comes with its own issues: namely, that it make Lester seem perfectly justified in how he treats her. With Lester, we at least get to spend time in his (hateful, perverted) head, and this is meant to generate some empathy between the character and the audience. Carolyn might have her own neuroses and micro-traumas that account for her spiteful behavior, but we get no narration, no justification, for her. This problem is also not at all helped by the way she is performed. Seeing how her character is played like twelve decibels louder than any other character in the movie, I honestly wonder if Annette Benning hates Carolyn even more than Lester does.

The original sin both characters commit is not having sex with one another. They’re both just so unfulfilled in their marriage that the next logical step is for Carolyn to buy a gun with the intent of shooting her husband. We’re expected to relate to this. In a movie already overflowing with spite, this is possibly the dirtiest pocket of it, and I genuinely have to wonder what societal need the creative team thought they were filling. If you’re repressing emotions about calling your wife a “bloodless, money-grubbing freak,” then this is the movie for you.

    “But that’s the point!” the critics in the day said. “They’re all terrible people because that’s modern society!” Well, that only carries so far. This can only be a commentary if the characters face any kind of consequences for their actions. They didn't necessarily need to become better people, but they seem to arrive at their respective resting places without even the tease of self-reflection.

                The spool net’s retrospective reading of the movie sums up Lester's character best:

“Instead, Lester acts unilaterally and selfishly and brings all of reality down around his ears. He got the car he wanted, the laid-back fast food job he wanted, the body he wanted, and the attentions of the teenage girl he wanted and all he had to do was completely upset the lives of everyone around him ... 

“In a way, Lester’s selfishness continues past the grave. He gets to realize he should be grateful ‘for every single moment of my stupid little life’ . . . However, those still living are still trapped in the unraveled world he left behind.

“His daughter Jane must live with being the first to find him dead and the knowledge that part of her wanted him that way. Carolyn is stuck with the reality that he discovered her cheating and the two never came to any sort of choice about what that meant for their future. Angela was in the house when he was killed and has a severed relationship with Jane because of Lester’s increasingly aggressive flirtations. And so on down the line. Lester gets nirvana, those still alive have the hell he molded.”

    I guess not every character has to be George Bailey-level virtuous, but Lester gets to reach self-actualization without having to apologize or feel any sense of contrition for being a hateful little slug. And that’s the underlying problem with this movie—it hates everything, and it expects you to as well.

American Beauty Hates Everything 

Aristotle introduced the term “catharsis” to the world describing the flushing of emotions when a simulated reality (such as art) becomes the mediating force for achieving closure for some kind of unresolved emotion. When an impoverished Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind declares she'll never be hungry again, she's empowering not just herself, but also her audience who in 1939 would have been caught between the crossfires of The Great Depression and World War II. This was an audience that would have known hunger and uncertainty over what a tumultuous future held, and them watching Vivien Leigh declare into a crimson sunrise that "they're not going to break me!" . . . that's catharsis.

Movies with an eye on the box office or the Oscars will sell themselves on offering a cathartic experience, and American Beauty was no different. When Lester says "Both my wife and daughter think I'm this gigantic loser and they're right, I have lost something. I'm not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn't always feel this... sedated," people knew exactly what he was talking about, and his power trip to shed the numbing shackles of domesticity charged audiences with a cathartic lightning storm that left them feeling invincible.

But the catch with catharsis is it doesn't validate exclusively wholesome beliefs or behaviors. It reinforces whatever attitudes you feed it. Moreover, the controlled universe within film comes with safety nets that real life does not. Attempting to blackmail your boss with a false sexual harassment charge (he's seen American Beauty too) may not go as well for you as it does for Lester. Handled irresponsibly, catharsis can reinforce dangerous beliefs and reward maladaptive thought processes. A movie that celebrates and rewards hateful behaviors gives its audience permission to engage in such behaviors after they leave the theater. Case in point: this movie.

    One scene for example has the Burnhams eating dinner together while Carolyn berates Lester in front of Jane for his reckless behavior. Carolyn’s biting comments continue to escalate, and Lester stands up and tells Carolyn and Jane that he’s not going to be treated like he doesn’t exist anymore. Carolyn shrilly cuts in yet again, and Lester silences her by throwing his plate at the wall and then telling her “Don’t interrupt me, honey.” He says this while towering over Carolyn, who along with Jane is staring wide-eyed at Lester, entirely speechless. Having got what he wanted, Lester sits back down at the table and informs Jane and Carolyn that he will be making changes to the nightly dinner music.

This is framed as an empowering moment, just another example of Lester taking back control of his life. Incidentally threat displays like this are also a sign of domestic abuse, but nevermind that. Lester’s finally in charge! His gesture was a little over the top, sure, but it was justified because Carolyn was just being so annoying, the film tells us. She deserved it, didn’t she? She shouldn’t have pushed him so. She had it coming ...

    Whether or not people who watch this scene start literally throwing their plates against the wall to get attention is irrelevant if it reinforces an idea that you are justified in making whatever threat display you fancy as long as the person you are threatening is annoying enough. This scene appears to be delivering that sense of empowerment for a lot of people. The YouTube video for the dinner scene is full of revering comments like “So this is how it sounds when a man’s balls drop.” 

This is where in my book the movie crosses the line from merely “not as good as we thought” or "just a movie of its time" to insidious. This movie celebrates a world where the only way to self-actualize is to flip everyone the bird—your wife, your boss, your dad, your best friend, everyone. The movie starts from a place of truth, but somewhere along the way decides that regressing to an infantile state of indulgence is just more fun.

If the film gets away with this, it's only because there are no humans in this movie. There are only pin cushions. They are vessels for all that we hate about modern living. They have no complexity and do not bleed when we beat them. Flimsy as this movie may be, we're willing to go along for the ride so we can play whack-a-mole with avatars for our least favorite people.

Carolyn is every wife/mother/neighbor that anyone ever hated for being so artificial, and this movie lets you imagine that behind her flaky front is a family that hates her as much as you do. Angela is the vapid and shallow popular girl that went to your high school who you always wished someone would call out for being vapid and shallow. And that fill-in-the-blank authority figure who tortured you with his rigid traditionalism? What if he was tortured by his own suppressed homosexuality? There are no humans in this movie, only pin cushions. The movie releases every bottled emotion--every single one--except, of course, empathy.

Looking Closer

    For what it’s worth, I really like the last ten minutes of this movie. I even think that handled more responsibly, Lester’s near-sexual encounter with Angela could have actually made for a profound moment. It’s not like a lot of the pieces needed for this film to work weren't in place. Take for example this exchange between Lester and Angela during what will be his final conversation with a living person.

LESTER: How's Jane?

ANGELA: What do you mean?

LESTER: I mean, how's her life? Is she happy? Is she miserable? I'd really like to know, and she'd die before she'd ever tell me about it.

ANGELA: She's . . . she's really happy. She thinks she's in love.

LESTER: Good for her.

ANGELA: How are you?

LESTER: . . . It's been a long time since anybody asked me that. I'm great.

It's also worth noting that the original pitch for the movie featured a much darker ending wherein Lester's family took the rap for his murder and were sentenced to prison. Midway through post-production, that ending was dropped in favor of Lester's closing soliloquy about true beauty. (Reportedly most of the cast was surprised at the premiere when they saw this ending.)

    I'll confess I'm not privy to the actual thought processes behind this change, but at least from an outsider's perspective, it looks as though even Mendes and Ball figured an introspective ending would have a better effect than one last punch at the grieving Burnhams. Even so, this revision only highlights how out of place this ending is with everything that came before.

    The movie that earned American Beauty’s last ten minutes would have been the challenging but rewarding film American Beauty pretends to be, but the finished product would rather vomit over domesticity as a whole and then rick-roll the audience with vaguely philosophical platitudes. At what point during Lester’s pursuit of a teenager were we supposed to learn that shooting stars and autumn leaves are actually what make the world beautiful?

Silver Linings Playbook, a superior movie by every measure

    Again, there are a thousand examples of other films tackling this same issue much more effectively. The Incredibles shows a man weighed down by the mundanity of suburban living and has him reconcile with it by giving him an actual character arc. A key dynamic in Silver Linings Playbook is Pat’s failure to conform to a more nuclear vision of how he should be, and he comes to terms with who he is without deliberately humiliating his family or spitting in the face of suburbia itself. Kramer vs Kramer and Marriage Story tackle the topic of divorce—one of the most volatile subjects in the domestic sphere, but they leave you feeling only compassion for all parties involved. Even The Graduate and Donnie Darko are similarly dissatisfied with modern living, but they treat their characters better than punching bags. What was American Beauty's excuse?

    The foundation of American Beauty is the stifling effect of living behind facades and a call to wake-up from superficiality. It’s not a bad aim, and for a lot of people in 1999, this movie fueled them with the energy to break out of that sleep. But once we’re finally awake, when we’re figuring out what we’re going to do with that energy—what appetites we’re going to entertain and what impact we’re willing to leave on the people around us—we can certainly do better than this movie.

--The Professor