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Elizabethan Beauty
What was interesting and well done in American Beauty had a lot to do
with the baby boomer generation's dead-ended idealism, with their kids'
reactions to that, with the immaturity latent in both that old 60s
idealism and the patterned suburban life that followed. It had to do
with responsibility and sacrifice. It had to do with lust and/versus
relationships. It had to do with auuthority. It had to do with the
limits of a human being's ability to have and be everything (reaching for
everything, we hold onto nothing). And while it shares characters and
plot strains with past movies, that hardly makes it suck.
I.e., this will not wash: "Oh Shakespeare. What a hack. Polonius is yet
another doddering old man full of ridiculous advice, Hamlet is just
another dispossessed prince (albeit an irritatingly melancholy one), and
Ophelia is just another love lorn girl afraid to live without her love.
Didn't we have enough of tragic hero deaths when the dragon beat Beowulf?
And at least Beowulf didn't spend all his time brooding in the crypt!
These ideas are all a thousand years old! Honestly, these
people-pleasers like Shakespeare and his more restrained but hardly more
talented peers, Marlowe and Jonson, are here today, gone tomorrow. What
we need is something truly original."
Blech-o.
That is all.
Fred
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