When American Beauty nabbed the Oscar for Best Picture in March 2000, its win seemed forward-thinking. The movie dealt with sex and drugs, blackmail, homophobia, infidelity and suburban dysfunction, producer Dan Jinks proclaimed during his acceptance speech. And in the middle of all this was a character named Ricky Fitts, who at one point says, Sometimes theres so much beauty in the world I feel like I cant take it, and everyone in the audience knew exactly what he meant.

For the better part of two decades, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had mostly handed its top prize to traditional period pieces with a sweeping dramatic scale: Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Schindlers List, Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic, the list goes on. But American Beauty? That was different. A satire about contemporary domesticity that ended with a bitter gunshot didnt offer the same uplift as, say, Forrest Gump and Shakespeare in Love. Its rose petals were spiked with thorns, an apt reflection of the countrys ethos after Y2K paranoia and the Columbine shootings.

Oh, how the mighty fall.

Today, American Beauty is, by and large, seen as anything but forward-thinking. In the 20 years since it debuted to rapturous reviews and a global $356 million intake, the films reputation has tumbled precipitously. What was once a provocative masterstroke now looks like retrograde hooey. Plenty of classics undergo cultural reappraisals as time amends our ideas about what constitutes valuable storytelling, but few have turned into such a widespread punchline.

How American Beauty declined is complex, and why it declined will vary based on whose perspective you hear. Thats often the case when somethings prestige shifts without a common denominator to unite the so-called backlash. But this isnt a routine example of internet hot takes demanding retroactive wokeness, even if the movie raises questionable suggestions about pedophilia, queerness and violence. Nor we can lay the about-face at Kevin Spaceys feet, even though the actors numerous sexual assault allegations color how one might see his characters rapey proclivities.

If we look closer, as the movies tagline requests, apprehension around American Beauty set in fairly quickly, through parodies and national tragedies and many a late-night joke.

American Beauty is the story of Lester Burnham (Spacey), an affluent magazine executive fed up with his corporate career and sexless marriage to an image-conscious real estate agent (Annette Bening). Cue the midlife crisis. Lester quits his job, buys his dream car and develops an infatuation with his teenage daughters (Thora Birch) blond cheerleader friend (Mena Suvari) textbook man-child conduct. Meanwhile, the Burnhams new neighbors are a repressed family led by retired Marine Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper), whose wife (Allison Janney) is nearly catatonic and whose aforementioned son (Wes Bentley) is a brooding, voyeuristic weed dealer. As their lives intersect, melodrama unfolds.

Alan Ball, whod written for the sitcoms Grace Under Fire and Cybill, found inspiration for his screenplay in the Amy Fisher scandal, a plastic bag hed seen blowing in the wind outside the World Trade Center, the six-feet-under narration from Sunset Boulevard and his experiences growing up in residential Georgia. DreamWorks, co-founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, bought Balls script in April 1998 after a bidding war with rival studios, giving the project instant clout. At the time, Hollywood was drunk on tart suburban satires about white America, from Edward Scissorhands and Serial Mom to Pleasantville, The Ice Storm and The Truman Show. The following December, cameras were rolling a fast turnaround by industry standards. First-time film director Sam Mendes, who had recently won acclaim for his Broadway revival of Cabaret, sat at the helm.

By the time American Beauty premiered in September 1999 at the Toronto International Film Festival a key awards-season springboard the buzz was electric. This was the hot property of the fall, and DreamWorks kept the momentum alive by releasing it in theaters the same month, when it could still ride the festival wave. Worried such dark subject matter wouldnt play well in heartland malls, the studio initially expected the movie to hit 700 screens. (For comparison, The Sixth Sense, released two months earlier, maxed out at approximately 2,800.) But Beauty exceeded expectations, climbing to more than 1,500 screens and cementing a position as the years Oscar front-runner.

Most critics gushed over the film , rightly praising Mendes sleek pacing and Thomas Newmans hypnotic score, among other hallmarks. But in revisiting those reviews from the more socially enlightened vantage of 2019, its striking how few challenged its dodgy ideas about gender, class and sexuality, given that American Beauty would hardly survive the think-piece cycle that now monopolizes pop culture.