On DVD: "Meet Bill" does not conquer the all-American beauty

Oct 09, 2008 (Las Cruces Sun-News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- YCC | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- If the water supply during the making of "American Beauty" had been pumped full of Prozac, "Meet Bill" (2007) might have resulted.

But instead of revisiting the always eternal theme of the outwardly successful but inwardly miserable, adding 10 years of fresh wounds, the misery of "Meet Bill" is blurred and tamped down. It checks an embarrassing number of "American Beauty" moments, but their delicacy is false and edited-for-TV seeming:

Repulsed by his own gut, Bill returns to his youthful sport, swimming, just like Kevin Spacey, in "American Beauty," dusted off the weight bench. Much staring into the bathroom mirror ensues. Both leave a cushy white-collar job for fast food, Spacey for burgers and Bill for a donut chain.

Bill's wife also has an affair, but instead of it being laughably, smartly sick, like Annette Bening and the King of Real Estate, this tryst is tame as a perfume ad.

And while

Spacey retreats to the garage to reclaim a cave, a man-zone, Bill sets up a tent in the yard. A tent tall enough to stand in. And set up both a cushy cot and a kitchen table for the espresso machine. Let's explain the parallels like this: Spacey's vice is masturbating. Bill's is Snickers bars. Instead of treading into the love affair with a 17-year-old territory that scared so many of the suburban squares "American Beauty" pilloried, we have Jessica Alba, to whom Bill reacts like she's a bag of firewood.

The only reason "Meet Bill" is at all watchable is Aaron Eckhart, as Bill, who can go from slippery nicotine lobbyist ("Thank You For Smoking") to comic book villain with a dissolved face ("The Dark Knight") without wrinkling a shirt. Because I'm not the kind of girl whose idea of happiness is lighting a Yankee Candle and eating a can of frosting with a butter knife, I haven't seen "No Reservations," where he plays a dreamy chef alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones, but I imagine he'd carry that piece of dreck too.

Logan Lerman, last seen as Christian Bale's doomed son in "3:10 To Yuma," plays a private school Master of the Universe in training, an unnamed teen Eckhart mentors. And he carries off a burlesque strip tease in women's underwear like no woman-loving transvestite since Tim Curry in "Rocky Horror Picture Show." Lerman's "Malcolm In the Middle" prodigy may not have a name, but he's supposed to have everything that Bill lacks -- he's a chance to talk a younger self out of selling out.

And Eckhart doesn't give a bad "run away!" talk: "Working sucks, OK? Working sucks! And it doesn't matter if you're in a bank, a department store or a donut factory, because once you've been there long enough, the only thing you'll care about is when your next pay increase is, how many vacation days you've accrued and if your health insurance is going to pay for the cholesterol medicine that keeps your heart pumping ... So no matter what you do, you make sure you make a lot of money doing it because it all sucks!"s

Unfortunately, the message carries no oomph except that of cliche. When The Kid passes Bill a joint in his SUV, you expect the next scene to be the two of them blazing down the highway, screaming along with Stevie Nicks's "Edge of Seventeen" with their arms out the windows. Worse, a week after Bill decides he's found himself again, you know he's going to be back at the Snickers, resigning himself to a larger size of Lacoste polos. Someday, he and The Kid will have a laugh about their wacky week. I loved "American Beauty." "American Beauty" is one of my top ten desert island movies. "Bill," you're no "American Beauty."

Ashley Meeks can be reached at ameeks@lcsun-news.com; (575) 541-5462.

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