It’s a tricky business to leave American Beauty feeling all right, but the film works very hard to make that possible, despite its dismal representation of suburban living. Scripted by first-time screenwriter Alan Ball (who used to write for Cybill and off-Broadway) and directed by British theater veteran Sam Mendes (Cabaret, The Blue Room), the film features Thora Birch, once Harrison Ford’s school-uniformed daughter in the Tom Clancy movies, now a really pissed-off teen named Jane, living in the generic ’burbs with her hateful and self-hating parents, Lester (Kevin Spacey) and Carolyn (Annette Bening). The poor kid doesn’t have a chance. She’s a morose cheerleader with pale skin and red-red lipstick, as well as a blond, burstingly beautiful best friend, Angela (Mena Suvari, the golden girl of American Pie), also on the squad, who absorbs all attention whenever they’re in the same space.

Birch is absolutely brilliant. Her sophisticated performance of Jane’s despair and aspirations — to be like Angela, to be loved by her father or someone resembling him, to be anywhere but where she is, in a room where her mother is melting down before her eyes — save American Beauty from comic, surreal overkill. She anchors the film’s easy-target hysterics in a character whose face — more than any dialogue or situation — registers the dark nuances of adolescent fear, disgust and longing.

However, most critical attention has been centered on the movie’s insights into Lester’s horrific existence. This is understandable, as he is the narrator. Right off the bat he tells us, "This is my life. In less than a year, I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. In a way I’m dead already." The language is brutal and lyrical. The scene beneath the voiceover is alarmingly sterile but extremely familiar: an overhead shot of a suburban neighborhood, all the houses alike, all the streets going nowhere. In an instant, he’s sympathetic, the heart of the film. You anticipate and dread his death, and wonder who will be responsible.

You’re led to believe that it’s Jane, indirectly or otherwise. The very first shot in the film is her face, on video, pouting. She’s talking to whoever holds the camera, whom we learn later is her boyfriend, a strange, desperate and abused new neighbor named Ricky (Wes Bentley). He affords his elaborate entertainment system by selling pot (to her dad) but he spends most of his time videotaping everyone, in particular Jane at all hours, from any position he can manage, as she crosses her lawn, gossips in the schoolyard, passes by her bedroom window. In this first scene, she talks about how unhappy she is, and how much she dislikes Lester. "I need a father who’s a role model," she says. "Someone should put him out of his misery." Off camera, Ricky offers to kill him for her.

This offer is certainly foreboding, especially since it’s followed by Lester’s announcement of his imminent demise. As the action proceeds, Jane is revealed as being typically teenagerish in her wrath: that is, not convinced that what she thinks she wants is really what she wants. (Angela says that the worst thing is to be "ordinary," and Jane believes her for most of the film, also accepting Angela’s plainly unfounded judgment that she — Jane — is ordinary.) She’s also passive and fearful, despite her desperation, characteristics she’s absorbed from Lester and Carolyn (who sells real estate badly and has an affair with the local "real estate king," played by Peter Gallagher). But Ricky, he’s another story: a ticking time bomb, embodying the stereotype that suburban white boys are fast becoming in today’s mass-media eye. His backstory includes a pathologically passive mom (Allison Janney) and a menacing dad, Marine Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper, devastating in a truly troubling role).

Fitts’ salient traits are ruthlessness, rigidity and homophobia — the ’90s insta-signs of imminent suburban-guy breakdown — which definitively set him apart from Lester, who genuinely likes his gay neighbors and who becomes remarkably flexible once he loses his advertising job and falls in love with Angela. This latter development comes to resembles Lolita, in that Angela relishes her role as jailbait, misunderstanding it as a means to self-worth (a typical girl’s mistake, hardly pathological in her given environment). Lester’s redemption takes up the movie’s length and emotional focus, but he leaves walking disasters in his wake: most obviously, his undone wife and guilt-traumatized child.

By the time these results become clear to you, the film will be over. It ends, as it promises in its opening frames, with Lester’s death. The face that will haunt you is Jane’s, as it haunts her father, her boyfriend and her mother. Mopey and dreamy, implacable and lovely, Jane, like Lissa in Best Laid Plans, wants more than she can imagine. If only the movies around them were so ambitious.

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