But then that's typical of Alan Ball's textbook - set-up, pay-off - screenplay. Acts, motivations, dramatic resolution. The result, for all its award-scooping precocity, is both processional and formulaic. Let's be generous, though, and say that dead ad-man Lester Burnham's (Kevin Spacey) opening monologue only borrows from Sunset Boulevard.

Lester's life teetered on the verge of collapse - wife Carolyn (Annette Benning) and daughter Jane (Thora Birch) despised him; the boss didn't want him - and then Jane introduced nubile, sexually precocious cheerleader Angela (Mena Suvari). Dazed and confused, Lester quit for a career in burger-flipping, a teen-dream muscle car, working out and tapping the neighbours' son (Wes Bentley) for rec-drugs.

Spacey works some over-familiar mannerisms (see also Swimming With Sharks, Glengarry Glen Ross, Hurlyburly), while Ball sacrifices his ensemble to grandstand Lester; Angela the sexpot is a cipher, Carolyn an underwritten sitcom leftover. Jane has substance, but she's written as cliché. There's nothing here you haven't seen done before and better. (Try Alexander Payne's Election).

Ricky the dealer offers the key. He autopsies Ball's script to reveal it for what it really is: a Trojan Horse. Ricky's tic is that he videos everything; a bedroom stacked with Hi-8 of dead birds, neighbours, plastic bags. There is beauty everywhere, he tells Jane, you just have to look. Profundity as suburban mediocrity. But pretended family relationships, video confessionals - haven't these, until recently, been the exclusive preserve of Canada's Atom Egoyan?

American Beauty calculates that you won't have seen Family Viewing or Speaking Parts or The Adjuster. Blue Velvet. Todd Solondz's excoriating Happiness. Or even Ang Lee's devastating The Ice Storm. (Bentley and Birch are ringers for the altogether more astute Maguire and Ricci.) Oh yes, we've been here before. Only Lee doesn't need a murder; Egoyan invests video with weight, not affectation; and Solondz risked far more than simple middle-age lust. American Beauty sugars its pill.

Debutante theatre Wunderkind Sam Mendes directs with some authority, but his vapid little picture still looks like good TV. Lester's reveries in particular are prosaic and do little to detract from the prevailing atmosphere of misogyny. Benning can do little with the part as written, while even better lines couldn't save Suvari. The gags are sometimes good, but their surround is trite and laboured. (Ball cut his teeth in soap opera.)

Despite its tagline - 'Look closer' - there never is anything more to this than meets the eye. The only time it does push the envelope - by suggesting that dealing Class A narcotics might actually be the way to genuine happiness - it pulls its punches. Typical.