American Beauty’s midlife crisis: ‘The Kevin Spacey scandal doesn’t really have anything to do with the movie’

As ‘American Beauty’ approaches its 25th anniversary, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at the Oscar-winning film, and says, it should be judged on its own merits, not dismissed due to a string of sexual misconduct allegations against its star, Kevin Spacey

Mena Suvari as Angela Hayes in ‘American Beauty’ (1999) (Dreamworks/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Moments after the opening credits, a middle-aged family man with a seemingly perfect life is shown jerking off during his morning shower – he confides in a voiceover that it’s “the highpoint of my day. It’s all downhill from here”. The movie is set in one of those American suburban neighbourhoods where everything seems idyllic, but it ends with him having his brains blown out by his neighbour. The 18-rated feature has teenage sex, adultery, drug use, lots of voyeurism and surrealistic scenes of a naked woman in a rose-petal-filled bath. There is a strange, somewhat random interlude in which two adolescents look in rapt wonder at camcorder footage of a plastic bag blowing in the wind as if it is the most remarkable thing they have ever seen.

Best Picture Oscar winners don’t come any stranger, queasier or more morbid than British director Sam Mendes’s debut feature, American Beauty (1999). It was a triumph at the time, picking up five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor for Kevin Spacey as the suburban dad Lester Burnham, who has a midlife crisis and becomes infatuated with his teenage daughter’s best friend. However, almost 25 years after the cameras started rolling in late 1998, it’s now a film that seems like very tainted goods.

Spacey has been in court in London this week as the defendant in a lurid sex assault trial in which he is accused of predatory behaviour toward a succession of young men. He denies all charges. His reputation has taken a severe battering in recent years and the film itself has suffered as a result.