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 American Beauty: such a pretty title for a movie as messed up as it is. Complete with never-before-seen levels of perversion, voyeurism, and all-around inappropriate behavior one would serve himself well by reading the back of the DVD case (or maybe a Coolfilmz review!) of this film rather than watching it based on the title alone.
Starring Kevin Spacey as the depressed and disillusioned middle aged father, Annette Bening as the success-starved wife, mother and real estate agent and a cast of other characters all with their own disturbing hang-ups; American Beauty is a tale of modern life in an American suburb. The story is told from the beginning by Spacey’s character, Lester Burnham, from some point after his death. Burnham basically fills the audience in on what his life was like and what led to his untimely death. Burnham had been working in the advertising industry and more or less hated his job no matter how well he masked it. He says that he “lost something and is not sure what it is” but that he has not always “felt this sedated.” Burnham begins to feel better when he see his daughter Jane’s friend Angela at a high school basketball game he and his wife attended to watch their daughters cheerleading routine. He acts a little creepy around Angela, who appears to be kind of slutty or, umm, sexually mature, for her age and he starts working out in hopes of impressing her. Around this same time, new neighbors, including Chris Cooper, who plays an ex-military officer as he does in most of his work and his son who like to videotape dead birds, plastic bags and the Burnham family among other things, move into the neighborhood. The son, Ricky, eventually begins seeing Jane and Lester begins to buy weed from him. He has plenty of time to smoke and work out since he quit his job and earned an awesome severance package. Burnham seems like he is close to enjoying his life for the first time in a while except that his wife is not happy that he isn’t working and she is left to be the breadwinner of the household. Her frustration eventually spills over into an affair with one of her competitors in local real estate. While all of this is going on, Ricky’s dad is, in accordance with his overbearing nature and tendency to jump to conclusions, suspicious that he is doing drugs and engaging in homosexual behavior with Burnham. Ricky’s dad beats the crap out of him and Ricky goes to find Jane and see if she’ll run away with him while at the same time Mrs. Burnham is driving home to confront her husband with her new gun. I don’t want to spoil exactly how it all ends, but its no secret that Burnham dies. This film won best picture in 1999 and an “Ace” recommendation from me in 2008 and deservedly so. I thought that the performances were excellent and that the screenplay was novel and innovative what with the posthumous narration. It also sought to make a point and I believe that the filmmakers were successful in that end. They wanted to show that the “American dream” of finding a comfortable job, getting married, buying a house and having kids isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for everyone. I think that they also wanted to show that the world can be a pretty crazy and screwed up place but as the narrator suggests at the very end, that it’s hard to stay mad when there is so much beauty in the world.
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