While I think serious drama must stem from a real social context, I don't think 'context' alone amounts to a 'critical' film; or in other words, foregrounding your film in a social context makes social analysis feasible, but not inevitable. That's the sad situation in a lot of American cinema.
It's been several years since I saw
American Beauty. I find it interesting that my three lasting comments above all pertain to the film's commercial impact, and I never go beyond the superficial with regard to its intellectual content. That speaks volumes about my position at the time of writing, but it might also say something about the film itself.
I see the film oozing with social context for each and every character - their jobs, their peers, their circle of friends or lack of it, their cultural values and their social pressures.But all of it is very specific to a certain class, which most of us would classify as "middle class". There is no way it can be universal in context and it doesn't claim to be too. The questions in my mind for the past few days are
1) How can something be both universal and social context specific? Wetdog has pointed out that even feelings like "death of a child" are very social context specific, which I agree with.
Vague terms pertain to vague concepts. 'Universalism' - and its friend, 'Timelessness' - may as well be 'Truism', or
what we ought to know. Works of art are never criticised and are always praised for 'being universal'; that shows the crisis our sciences find themselves in. I think art should enhance and enlighten and investigate, but never solely 'teach'.
Nothing can ever
really be universal, or at least not without risking being dull at the same time. But a work of art can shed light on the General, by showing us an analysis of the Particular. I think
The Wire does that: its characters are all dramatically fully fleshed out, but you always know they're also representative of others in their place, or others elsewhere, before them and after them; the writers concentrate on Namond, Dukie, Randy and Michael in season four, but you get the sense they could have easily concentrated on another four characters. You might say, "Isn't this the case with every character in every film?" But I'd say no, it isn't. A lot of drama takes as its starting point a unique aspect that will make us 'identify with' the character; it's emotionally manipulative and intellectually insulting - cowardly, in a word - to create a fiction that denies us the General by means of making it
too particular.
I think this answers your second point, too. But:
Synecdoche might be universal in its 'meditation' on death, but going back to my previous point, such universalism results in truism. And to Kaufman, we may throw the question: "What's your point, exactly?" If the point is that we all die, and death in itself is a tragedy or a loss, then the film's no masterpiece, and even quite depthless, considering what other cynical observations it throws into the pan along the way. It's hysterically self-absorbed. Death isn't anything new. It's been a constant and unavoidable fact since the first breath.
American Beauty is a feel-good film for every would-be male fantasist rebel. It tries to flesh things out by disguising itself as being concerned with a family - or 'White Middle America Every Family', to be conceptually precise - but it's Spacey's film, is set up to be Spacey's narrative ("I'm Lester Burnham, this is me, masturbating in the shower...(!!!)").
The evaluation of the film in this light ("should we 'relegate'
American Beauty because it is bourgeois?") should hinge on two or a few things: the extent to which it is critical of the contradictions at stake within the social context and the narrative that it foregrounds; the sincerity with which it goes about its analysis; its outcome.
As I've said already, it's been a while since I saw the film, but I expect that upon watching it again, I'd see Lester's death - and the manner in which it occurs - as frivolous and unnecessary, a plot device to deter any genuine social analysis. Even the manner in which it's revealed - the drama plunges into mystery, and the narrative is set up in this way from the very beginning, with the daughter suggesting she wants her father killed - helps disguise the lack of substance the film has to offer. It keeps us interested, sure, but it has very little to say.
Surface banners read 'Critical of the American Dream', which I think helped the film a great deal. But it's vague and superficial, and I don't think we can borrow anything specific from its story to apply to the General, because again, its Particular is too eccentric, whilst also being very banal because of that.
That sounds contradictory, being too eccentric and yet very banal, but I'll elaborate a little. Conceptually, you've got 'Every'-characters: the middle-aged father and husband, bored and 'dead'; his wife, who's also bored and having an affair; their 'emo' daughter, who is going through Generalized Adolescence for the sake of short-hand drama. But beyond these things, you've got very little. Everything remains conceptual, superficial. Indeed, it is
because these characters are set up and written as plausible, 'identifiable' concepts, that they remain vague and superficial. It's quite transparent and quite revealing. I think the problem is that the film tries to work with and undercut generic clichés of film genre and dramatic writing, but it fails to transcend its stereotypes.
You need a balance, a subtlety, and also a faith in both your storytelling and the characters themselves; and also in your audience. You need patience to create serious art; patience too to create the kind of characters required for serious art. Mendes shows me none of that in this film.