It was March 2000, and everything was lifting roses for “American beauty.”
There was box office revenue (not adjusted for inflation, not adjusted for inflation), according to the data site’s box office revenue. Rave review (“The Hell of Pictures,” written by Kenneth Tulan in the Los Angeles Times). Three Golden Gloves.
“I thought it would be a little arthouse film, so it was strange,” said Alan Ball, who won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay, on a recent call from his home in Los Angeles. He spoke in a conversation. “I think that’s what all of us expected.”
“I never thought it would grow,” says Ball’s satire and materialistic ball-like satire about his suburban family, who has left his office job and is obsessed with him. said Annette Behning, who played his wife. A best friend of my teenage daughter.
And then more glory: the five Oscars including Best Picture, Director (Sammendes), Original Screenplay (Ball), Cinematography (Conrad L. Hall), and Actor (Spacey).
“I’m a little overwhelmed,” Mendes, a big-eyed, said in his acceptance speech that he joined the ranks of Delbert Mann, Jerome Robbins, Robert Redford, James L. Brooks and Kevin Costner. , said as the only filmmaker. Top Director Honor for Academy’s feature director debut.
“I had a flask in my pocket,” Ball said, recalling the moment. “That was the only way I could deal with it.”
Critics agreed that the film is a refreshing break from the typical high-concept Hollywood film mold. A decade after being dominated by era dramas like Shakespeare in Love and Titanic, it represents a victory for risky filmmaking. In an era of prosperity, when America’s unemployment rate hovered by around 4%, the film served as an outlet for injustice for middle-class suburban villagers who were not satisfied by comfortable jobs and luxury homes in wealthy neighbours .
It was kind of a thing to talk about hidden underneath abdomen, like “Oh, people aren’t really satisfied with the perfect life, they’re actually secretly unhappy.” said Gabriel Rothman, an associate professor of science. Research in Los Angeles, California is working on culture and mass media.
If you look at the list of the 100 biggest films of the 1990s, you’ll expect to find “American beauty.”
absence?
In the context of a modern era where films were beaten in the crash after 9/11, and amid the post-economic crash and political upheaval, film critic Stephanie Zachalek said, “It’s so painful that it seems unfair.” I wrote it in 2019.
So what happened?
“I think culture decided it was a “significant” film despite the fact that it was made by a young studio in the same spirit as an independent film, for less than $15 million,” Mendes emailed. I am writing. “It was awarded all the awards, so the only place I could travel afterwards was heading towards repulsion.”
Of course, there is another obvious factor. Spacey’s fall from grace after being accused of sexual misconduct by more than 12 men and teenage boys who date back 20 years ago – he was acquitted of sexual assault in 2023 – it’s It’s now 42 years – the old Leicester desire for 17-year-old Angela Hayes (Mena Svalli) is no longer bold but edgy, and well, it looks like there’s no tinkering.
Chris Cuckle, an associate professor of film history and theory at Temple University in Philadelphia, said that was certainly a part of it, but the change in critical opinion began well before the lawsuit.
“Oscar movies are often seen as something like middle blow,” he said. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Middlebrow could be a way that mass-market films can do something different, vast or experimental, but even so, Middlebrow’s films are There is a tendency to ridiculously laugh from people who view them as Gauche or Gauche. Dates.’
Film opinion is not necessarily in line with the politics and economics of period, but those factors can be factors. And when DreamWorks released a film in US theatres in September 1999, the climate was booming. The economy was thriving. Employment was abundant.
Simply put, it’s much easier to indulge in the fantasy of quitting a job when there’s a job to quit.
In other words, a movie about succumbing to your impulses – you’ve dumped a dead-end office gig, cheated on your spouse, and bumped into the spot to escape your strange and embarrassing parents.
“Everyone had a way,” said Dan Jinx, the film’s producer.
Therefore, terrorists crashed a pair of planes into the World Trade Center Tower in New York City on September 11, 2001, and after the 2008 financial crisis, the market fell into a recession for the next few years.
Suddenly, the man complaining about his boring perfect life and office work seemed rather quaint.
Mendes said that the attack led him to reevaluate his work as well.
“For at least 10 years from September 11th, I was embarrassed by how much of the film felt satisfied with me – a form of gazing at my belly button,” he said.
Then, in 2017, the #MeToo movement and the cultural shift was carried out, focusing on the views of sexual assault.
The character of 17-year-old Angela, who appeared to have been sexually liberated in 1999? Now, in a more nuanced understanding of sexual abuse, she presented herself as confidently controlling, but it is clear that she was being used.
Another factor: The increased acceptance of homosexuality led Vermont to become the first state to legalize citizen unions in 1999, and in 2015 the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.
In Oscar’s acceptance speech in Best Picture, Jinx argued that homophobia was one of the serious issues that “treated” the film. Gay man. However, these days, the bars of on-screen representation of LGBTQ characters, a contributor written by Feminist Film Criticism Blogscreen Queens, have become much higher.
“The secret gay trope of homophobics has died, and we all recently realized that it is very homophobic in itself,” read a 2020 wild reassessment. I’m here.
But not all revaluations are negative.
At the 2019 retrospective held at the Guardian, the film’s 20th anniversary, Critic Man Lodge acknowledged the film’s shortcomings, but “American beauty” was “primitively the artistic director of sadness and irony.” “Yin and Yang” was written. .
“Twenty years later, “American beauty” is not as clever as we thought it would be, but matures into the wisdom of accidentally wounded, fought,” he writes.
Mendes had a similar epiphany when he re-watched the film with the kids over a decade after its release.
“They pointed out to me that it was a deeply strange and unusual film,” he said. “It’s a very strange combination of a variety of perspectives and aesthetics, America and Europe, gay and straight, comic, serious, poetic and cartoonish.
“I still really like it,” he added. “But I feel that is very linked to people I was in the 90s.”
