Bening in "American Beauty"

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Wednesday, October 06, 1999 4:23:38 PM EST

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- It must be noisy around Annette Bening's house. Not only are she and husband Warren Beatty dealing with the buzz around his possible run for United States President, but there's a growing murmur of possible Academy notice for Bening's work in the film "American Beauty."

In it, Bening plays Carolyn Burnham, a complex, blonde caricature of the image-driven suburban homemaker. She's a real-estate agent who maniacally tends the American Beauty roses in her yard and pursues her faltering career as her daughter's sexuality blossoms and her marriage to Lester (Kevin Spacey, also a potential candidate for an Oscar) unravels.

As Lester weathers an ongoing epiphany triggered by the sexy appeal of his daughter's school friend, a martini-swilling, olive-crunching Carolyn comes on to the neighborhood's self-styled "king" of real estate, played by Peter Gallagher ("Summer Lovers," 1982; "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," 1989).

"You see the woman come apart at the seams," says Gallagher, who calls Bening's performance "heartbreaking and hysterical."

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Correspondent Mark Scheerer looks at the role that may get Annette Bening an Oscar. Windows Media 28K 80K

Her on-screen husband, no stranger to Oscar kudos (Spacey won a best supporting actor award for his work in 1995's "The Usual Suspects") says that watching Bening work in "American Beauty" was impressive.

"She found a kind of possession of this role," Spacey says. "There were moments during filming that I was just startled at where she was going."

Bening, now 41, says the over-ambitious career woman she plays in this, one of the year's most talked-about films, isn't a pleasant person, but one that she does recall from her suburban upbringings.

"I find that her predicament is familiar," she says, "and something I see around me and that I saw when I was a kid. She's not an idealized woman, you know. She's not a villain either, but she's certainly not the picture of how women should behave, how mothers should behave. There's something kind of impermissible about a woman behaving the way she does."

Critic Robert Horton of Film.com writes, "The desperate gratitude in Annette Bening's eyes as Carolyn listens to the can-do blather of the local real-estate king (Gallagher) is a superb depiction of the need for something, anything, to believe in."

Andrew O'Hehir, writing for Salon, seems less enamored than some of the role as written, but but speaks of Bening's "formidable acting chops ... expended on a feverish, sexually repressed demon whose few tiny moments of possible redemption are undermined by burlesque."

And reviewer Paul Clinton, writing for CNN.com, remarks on Bening's evocation of a "brittle wife ... a woman who just skims the surface of life, preferring a thin facade to introspection."

Bening turned heads in "Valmont" (above) and "The Grifters" (below)

Building momentum

In 1989, Bening "arrived" as a film actress of substance in Milos Foreman's film "Valmont," based on the "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" material that had also inspired the film "Dangerous Liaisons."

Like Gallagher and another "American Beauty" cast member, Scott Bakula, Bening has been familiar to New York theatergoers for more than a decade.

She earned a 1987 Tony Award nomination for her featured work in Tina Howe's "Coastal Disturbances" -- a show in which she wandered a gigantic sandbox with Timothy Dalton at Broadway's Circle in the Square. In Hollywood, she was nominated for best supporting actress in the role of a dispassionate con artist in 1990's "The Grifters."

The next year she starred opposite Beatty in "Bugsy," and then in 1995 she played the love interest of a widowed commander-in-chief (Michael Douglas) in "The American President."

It should be an interesting life-imitates-art twist if Beatty does in fact make a presidential bid -- a move that Bening, pregnant with the couple's fourth child, says she supports wholeheartedly.

Correspondent Mark Scheerer contributed to this report.