American Beauty is a stain on Hollywood – but don’t blame Kevin Spacey

Better, then, to take aim at its arrogant ineptitude. The writing is poor throughout, alternating between fortune cookie platitudes and would-be cutting displays of bitchiness, and, perhaps most surprisingly given Mendes’s enormous skills as a theatre (and, later, cinema) director, the performances, Spacey aside, are largely dismal. Bening starts at theatrical camp and goes up, or down, from there, and Peter Gallagher, as her smarmy real estate lover Buddy, offers an inferior retread of Charlie Higson’s sublime work in The Fast Show as the would-be Lothario car salesman Swiss Toni. Suvari and Birch look startled, as well they might; Bentley merely seems bored, being less an enigmatic poet of mystery and more that creepy camera-wielding guy who should be avoided at all costs. 

Cooper, meanwhile, can do little with that most one-dimensional of characters, the closeted military man Frank who eventually becomes murderous. To this day I’m unsure as to whether Mendes and Ball realise that the key visual gag that precipitates the climax – Frank sees Lester and Ricky, his son, enjoying a joint together, but from the angle he’s watching, it looks as if Ricky is giving Lester oral sex – has been lifted from a similar scene in Carry On Camping, in which it looks as if Terry Scott and Betty Marsden are doing unspeakable things by silhouette in their tent. 

Coincidentally, the same joke was used earlier that year in the Austin Powers sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me, indicating a remarkable degree of pre-millennial influence for a joke about a woman supposedly removing steadily more improbable items from her husband’s bottom.