Beauty in an American Winter

It is now three weeks into my time off from the last film I worked on, which I believe has the potential to be a cinematic gem, if not a classic.  So much depends on so many things that will take place in the editing room, in the decisions about what to lop off and what to leave in and how to weave one thing into another with beauty and skill that I cannot predict what the outcome will be.

Deep into winter, the Northwest has darkened into near-constant rainy days, and even though the physics of our solar system says the days are getting longer, they still feel too short and dim to get anything accomplished.  But every so often a bright, sunny respite beams out from the clouds, melting them away into mist over the river.  Gifted with a suddenly blue sky, I spend time on the deck watching my hawk Tennerin, who has been harassed now for several days by a single crow, which follows the hawk from tree to tree, and branch to branch for hours at a time.  All the birds, including the blue jays and the doves have been chasing each other and riding the blustery winter winds, living their lives mostly unseen by the rest of us humans.  I have to make the effort to look.  Now my hawk friend is sitting high above me as I write this, waiting on his fir tree for me to stop writing and play with him down on our empty field next to the river.

I’ve become contemplative and odd things catch my attention, surprising me with their own kind of brightness shining through in the winter doldrums.  I recently found myself watching the movie American Beauty and noticed how everything from the furniture to the music to the colors of the costumes worked to make that movie what it is: a classic and one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time.  Another aspect of this film that made it work was not clear to me until I tried to explain it to a friend afterward.  I was forced to put into words what I had previously only felt, a deep kind of emotional understanding.

There is the dialogue (or monologue, really) by Ricky Fitts, who is Lester (Kevin Spacey) Burnham’s young neighbor, when he is talking about his video of “the most beautiful thing he’s ever filmed”, which is a plastic bag dancing in the wind. He begins by explaining that the bag was playing with him, begging him to dance with it, like a little kid.  Then he goes on to say, “And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.” 

There are the voiceover monologues of Lester Burnham, who at the end describes life as “an ocean of time”, and reveals, “There’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…”  

These are monologues that are right “on the nose”, which is a no-no in writing, especially screenwriting. But they worked wonderfully in American Beauty because in counterpoint, the ironic, comedic characters played against it in a weird dynamic that forced you, (ironically?) to take the unabashedly spiritual words seriously.

And why not?  Annette Bening’s Carolyn Burnham, is a shrill termagant, highly colored and stylized.  Her musical loves, though, hint at a deeper longing in her than simply controlling her American Beauty roses and becoming a powerful and fulfilled real estate agent.  She forces her husband Lester and daughter Jane to listen to Bali Hai every night at dinner, and Bali Hai has a power, too, as silly as it is. Even if it is from an unreal musical that is stylistically and politically dated and expired, it still says out loud what deep inside we might truly feel:

Your own special hopes,
your own special dreams,
Bloom on the hillside
and shine in the streams.
If you try, you’ll find me
where the sky meets the sea.
Here am I your special island
Come to me, Come to me.

  You hear Bali Hai and know that there is a connection between this song and a beautiful, divinely-moving plastic bag. After all the two are neighbors, in an American suburb.

Carolyn’s bold colors, red and blue, cool white in her immaculate kitchen, and Lester’s yearning for a nostalgic version of first, true love all over again in a rock and roll past are given soul-searing force by using music to fix their emotions throughout the film.  The actual soundtrack music, composed by Thomas Newman, made the plastic bag scene effortlessly touching.  Before I knew who was behind the musical selections, I marveled at the perfection of the pairings between character, plot and popular songs.  When I found out Chris Douridas was the film’s music supervisor, I remembered his wonderful, wonderful radio show on KCRW, Morning Becomes Eclectic, where he would pair selections as disparate as a Disney instrumental from Pinocchio and readings by Jack Kerouac with a Bollywood female pop star’s danceable ballads, creating incredible musical journeys with every new show.

Repeated throughout American Beauty, punctuated by the color of vibrant, vicious red, is the notion of your heart opening, stopping, caving in, the roses bursting in nearly life-stopping beauty from the breast of a dancing cheerleader, while the choreography reflects the lights of Broadway in a song that connects, in all its smarmy ‘80’s gilded showbiz glamour with something almost terrible in its secret force: rose petals that for no reason spin out from us at the most surprising, least-provoked moment.

Like the movie I just wrapped, American Beauty changed dozens, perhaps hundreds of times with every decision by writer, director, actor, and editor.  It could have been as many as a thousand different movies at the end of the process.  Through creative synchronicity, or fate, or simply a connection to something unfathomably beautiful— maybe even that unseen “entire life behind things”, American Beauty went on to win five Oscars, including best picture, director, cinematography, actor, and original screenplay.

This time seeing the movie, I couldn’t, as usual, stop the tears from forming when I heard the plastic bag monologue.  Because I knew at the moment, through the process of watching it in creation on film (how I love film, the beauty of it separate from the story, in a way) that it is true, all of it.  There is an entire life behind things.