\n<\/p>\n
It was March 2000, and everything was coming up roses for \u201cAmerican Beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were the box office receipts (more than $350 million worldwide, not adjusted for inflation, against a budget of roughly $15 million, according to the data site Box Office Mojo<\/a>). The rave reviews (\u201ca hell of a picture,\u201d Kenneth Turan wrote in The Los Angeles Times<\/a>). The three Golden Globes.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was bizarre, because I expected it to be a little art house movie,\u201d Alan Ball, who won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay, said in a recent phone conversation from his home in Los Angeles. \u201cI think that\u2019s all that any of us expected it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI had no idea it was going to become what it became,\u201d said Annette Bening, who played a materialistic wife in Ball\u2019s satire about a suburban family whose father, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), quits his office job and becomes obsessed with his teenage daughter\u2019s best friend.<\/p>\n Then, even more laurels: Five Oscars, including best picture, director (Sam Mendes), original screenplay (Ball), cinematography (Conrad L. Hall) and actor (Spacey).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019m a little bit overwhelmed,\u201d a wide-eyed Mendes said in his acceptance speech, as he joined the ranks of Delbert Mann, Jerome Robbins, Robert Redford, James L. Brooks and Kevin Costner as the only filmmakers to win the academy\u2019s top directing honor for their feature directorial debut.<\/p>\n \u201cI had a flask in my pocket,\u201d Ball said, recalling the moment. \u201cThat was the only way I could kind of deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Critics agreed that the film was a refreshing break from the typical high-concept Hollywood movie mold: After a decade dominated by period dramas like \u201cShakespeare in Love\u201d and \u201cTitanic,\u201d it represented a triumph for riskier filmmaking. In an age of prosperity, when unemployment in America hovered around 4 percent, the movie served as an outlet for the malaise of middle-class suburbanites unfulfilled by their comfy jobs and gorgeous houses in affluent neighborhoods.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt was kind of a trope to talk about the hidden underbelly, like, \u2018Oh, people aren\u2019t actually happy with perfect lives, they\u2019re actually secretly dissatisfied,\u2019\u201d said Gabriel Rossman, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research addresses culture and mass media<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n So when you look on a list of the 100 greatest films of the 1990s<\/a>, you\u2019d expect to find \u201cAmerican Beauty\u201d \u2026 first, fourth, 10th?<\/p>\n Absent?<\/p>\n In the context of the modern era \u2014 post-9\/11, post-economic crash, amid political upheaval \u2014 beating up on the film \u201cis so painfully easy that it seems unfair,\u201d the film critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote in Time in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n So what happened?<\/p>\n \u201cI think the culture decided that it was an \u2018important\u2019 movie, despite the fact that it was made for less than $15 million by a young studio in the same spirit as an independent film,\u201d Mendes wrote in an email. \u201cIt was freighted with all that awards stuff, and so the only place it could travel after that was towards backlash.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, there is another glaring factor: Spacey\u2019s fall from grace after being accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen men and teenage boys dating back 20 years \u2014 he was acquitted of sexual assault charges in 2023<\/a> \u2014 that made the 42-year-old Lester\u2019s lust for the 17-year-old Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari) look no longer daring or edgy but, well, icky.<\/p>\n That was certainly part of it, said Chris Cagle, an associate professor of film history and theory at Temple University in Philadelphia, but the shift in critical opinion began well before the lawsuits.<\/p>\n \u201cOscar movies often are seen as kind of middlebrow,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing \u2014 middlebrow could just be a way in which a mass-market movie is able to do something different, expansive or experimental \u2014 but nonetheless, middlebrow films tend to maybe get derision from people who see them as gauche or dated.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Movie opinions don\u2019t necessarily match up with the politics or economics of a time period, but those elements can be a factor. And in September 1999, when DreamWorks released the film in theaters in the United States, that climate was boom times. The economy was thriving. Employment was plentiful.<\/p>\n To put it simply: It\u2019s much easier to indulge a fantasy of quitting your job when you have a job to quit.<\/p>\n Which meant a film about giving in to your urges \u2014 to ditch your dead-end office gig, to cheat on your spouse, to run away from your weird, embarrassing parents \u2014 hit the spot.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody had a way in,\u201d said Dan Jinks, a producer on the film.<\/p>\n So when terrorists crashed a pair of planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001 \u2014 and the markets subsequently plunged into a yearslong recession after the 2008 financial crisis \u2014 the film experienced a rapid fall from the grace.<\/p>\n Suddenly, a man complaining about his boringly perfect life and office job seemed rather quaint.<\/p>\n Mendes said that, in the wake of the attack, he too re-evaluated his work.<\/p>\n \u201cFor at least a decade after 9\/11, I was embarrassed by how much of the movie felt self-satisfied \u2014 a form of navel-gazing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Then came the #MeToo movement in 2017 and a culture-wide reorientation around the way we view sexual assault.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The 17-year-old Angela character who seemed so sexually liberated in 1999? Now, amid a more nuanced understanding of sexual abuse, it is clear that, though she presented herself as confident and in control, she was being taken advantage of.<\/p>\n Another factor: a growing acceptance of homosexuality, with Vermont becoming the first state to legalize civil unions in 1999 and the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage across the country in 2015.<\/p>\n In his Oscars acceptance speech for best picture, Jinks asserted that homophobia was among the serious issues the film \u201cdealt with,\u201d referring to the fact that the Burnhams\u2019 virulently homophobic neighbor, Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper), turns out to be a gay man. But nowadays, a contributor to the feminist film criticism blog Screen Queens wrote, the bar for onscreen representation of L.G.B.T.Q. characters is far higher.<\/p>\n \u201cThe homophobe-is-secretly-gay trope has been done to death and we\u2019ve all finally realised recently that it is actually, in itself, extremely homophobic,\u201d reads the less-than-rosy<\/a> reappraisal, which was published in 2020.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n