I'd been waiting for American Beauty since one day last summer in West Hollywood, when I first saw that now-familiar woman's torso on a billboard dominating the Sunset Strip. The adolescent hand intrigued me, and the single long-stemmed dewy dark-red rose was like an arrow across that torso, with its keyhole-like navel in the shape of a question mark. "Look closer," the promotion suggested, along with the names of the film's two superstars-sophisticated, sexy, contemporary-Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning. By now, of course, the advertising is also able to invite, "Look closer at the best reviewed movie of the year."