A mindtrip to the Moon and back
You've seen this movie before: a moderately successful family man with a big house in a placid suburb realizes he's unhappy with his life, so he takes a sudden detour for a seemingly immature but actually deeply important self-exploration. His wife, a career woman hyperfocused on being taken seriously, finds his antics increasingly irritating, while their teenage daughter has begun an unusual friendship with the new neighbor, a sensitive boy with an authoritarian father. This situation will not end well.
You've seen this movie before. It's called American Beauty and it premiered in 1999. At first it was highly praised for its critique of hollow bourgeois aspirations, but over the years it has been reevaluated and criticized for its simplistic melodrama and its uncritical centering of the male perspective. And when Kevin Spacey's history of sexual misconduct was exposed, the movie turned radioactive. No one dares touch it. Which is a pity, because American Beauty, underneath all its creepiness and its self-serious attempts at edginess, did have a few valuable things to say about the search for happiness.
Enter the 2022 movie Linoleum. It was never advertised as a remake, but it so cleverly deconstructs the plot of American Beauty that it might as well have openly acknowledged the extent of its debt. Similarly set in the late 1990s, it proposes a more empathetic alternative to the earlier movie's cynicism. And from this point on I'm going to need to spoil the secrets of Linoleum.
Imagine if the plot of American Beauty were told by the protagonist of the 2005 movie Stay, and you'll get the gist of what Linoleum is doing behind the curtain. And that's the last warning before full spoilers.
The ending of Linoleum reveals that the husband, the husband's father, and the neighbor's son are symbolic incarnations of one single person, an old man with dementia whose memories are chaotically remixing themselves in his last moments. He's been telling himself a story where the events of his youth, his adulthood and his old age are reenacted by different characters at the same time. At the core of his jumbled memories is the night his real father tried to kill him and instead died in a crash.
What this does for Linoleum's intertextual relationship with American Beauty is expand the perspective we're being asked to consider. American Beauty is a very selfish story, one in which the husband's worldview provides the dominating voice that defines the terms in which the plot is meant to be understood. In Linoleum, the fact that the core characters are the same person means that their separate perspectives are equally significant. This is not only the story of a middle-aged man seeking to reignite his enjoyment of life, but also the story of a boy struggling to find his own path beyond his father's shadow, and the story of an old man who is losing the sense of who he is. These parallel looks at three stages of the same life story complete the theme that American Beauty could only portray at one moment: the chain of circumstances that feed our satisfactions and our regrets.
While the husband's chosen method of correcting the course of his life in American Beauty is to become a jerk and a sexual predator, in Linoleum the unhappy husband embarks on a more wholesome pursuit: he's going to build a rocket in his garage. He has always wanted to be an astronaut, and he can't let his better years go by without achieving that dream. Now, let's remember that this plot point is part of the deathbed hallucination, so it should be interpreted as a stand-in for whichever aspirations the actual protagonist may have had. Being an astronaut is the stereotypical dream of every child, and in the movie's narrative it's used to represent the yearning for personal self-realization. So the literal text of the story shows us a man building a rocket in his garage, but the meaning of the story is about daring to dream big, about aiming for the stars.
Another way Linoleum improves upon American Beauty is in the character of the wife. In the first movie, she's an obstacle in the husband's quest for meaning. We're meant to agree that he's right to despise her, because everything about her personality and her goals is fake. Clearly, this is a very male-centric way of writing a marriage in trouble. Linoleum opts for a more nuanced look. This husband (again, inside the badly remembered story) genuinely loves his wife, but they've gradually lost the capacity to respect each other's wants. There was a time when they dared to dream big, but the big things that were supposed to come to their lives never did, and now they feel stuck. The epiphany that begins the reparation of their relationship is the wife's refusal to live by someone else's expectations. The fact that she also turns out to be a multiple character in the hallucination gives her equal rank of thematic importance as the husband.
Live enough years and you'll become intimately familiar with regret, with the longing for the road not taken. The ending of American Beauty resolves this problem by offering its protagonist a terrible choice that he ultimately rejects. And at that moment his life is ready to end. Linoleum refrains from pretending that we're ever ready to end; it doesn't even try to resolve the problem of regret. What it does propose is that, from a broad perspective, regret is a matter of how we remember our lives. And if we end up remembering differently, we may find unexpected forms of contentment.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
