Sublime ‘American Beauty’ best of 1999

In Theaters

“American Beauty”

So far, Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty” is the best American film of the year.

The film, which will receive a slew of Academy Award nominations next year, is sublime. It’s a deeply cynical, absolutely honest look at the hell of suburbia — and, the film suggests, the even more intolerable hell of middle age — that recalls Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm” in tone, Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” in content, and Alexander Payne’s “Election” in its biting depiction of a woman who will do anything to succeed.

It may not be an original, but it does what few contemporary films do — it tells the truth about the world in which we live.

The film follows Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a horny, boozy, 42-year-old frump of disillusionment primed to drop out of life physically exhausted and emotionally dead. Lester is a bitter piece of work whose brittle smile conveys poison, rage, frustration and sadness. He’s been forced out of his job of 14 years, his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), has worn a hole in their marriage by scratching and clawing her way to the bottom of the real estate business, and his teen-age daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), hates him for losing interest in her.

Unloved, unsung, unhappy and unwilling to do much about it, Lester buys bags of pot from the boy next door (Wes Bentley) and sinks into a fantasy life that’s so rich, it would make Walter Mitty swoon: He quits his job, ignores his wife’s torrid affair with the self-described “king of real estate” (Peter Gallagher), and starts pumping weights in an all-out effort to reclaim his youth and to get his daughter’s best friend (Mena Suvari) into bed.

Daring and brash, Mendes — the British director of Broadway’s “The Blue Room” and “Cabaret” — uses his cinematic debut to get to the core of the American experience.

That he succeeds is one triumph, but there are others: He mines an excellent performance out of Spacey, and he brings Bening’s career back on track by recognizing her strengths — just as she proved in 1991’s “Bugsy,” the actress is best when throwing a fist, a barbed insult or firing a gun.

In “American Beauty,” she gets to do all three.

Grade: A

“Random Hearts”

With so much grim, romantic cheese clogging its heavy script, it’s no wonder “Random Hearts” collapses on screen from cardiac arrest.

In spite of having Sydney Pollack on board as its director, Harrison Ford as a Washington, D.C.-based police sergeant, Kristin Scott Thomas perfectly cast as a New Hampshire congresswoman, and a story that conspires to get these two into bed after they learn their cheating spouses died together in a plane crash, the film feels like one of those wretched trans-Atlantic flights to Bora Bora — long and exhausting, its stale atmosphere, well, boring boring.

Not to mention morose. The somber tone Pollack strikes throughout is so depressing, it feels like the cinematic equivalent of two Valium tossed down with a vodka chaser.

Ford, as always, is worth watching — even if he does go a bit far with his laconic, brooding and troubled performance. But the same can’t be said for Scott Thomas, who struggles throughout with an American accent that’s so uneven, it undermines a film whose script is already too random to suit.

Grade: C-

On Video

“Election”

On the surface, Alexander Payne’s “Election” may appear to be just another high school film about high school students living high school lives, but director Payne wanted more — much more — and he got it.

So far, “Election” ranks just behind “American Beauty” as one of the year’s best films.

In it, greed and deceit, failure and sabotage, lust and hypocrisy come together in the wicked form of Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), a driven blond bombshell whose willingness to do anything, absolutely anything, to win a high school election sets the tone for a film that brilliantly mirrors society.

At once a satire and a tragedy, “Election” is too smart to fall victim to cliche, but the big news here is Matthew Broderick, whose winning role as Tracy’s nemesis schoolteacher is not to be missed.

Grade: A

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on WCSH-TV’s statewide “Morning Report.”