American Beauty took the world by storm in 1999. It received nearly universal acclaim for the writing, directing and acting. Unfortunately, the only reason I took (limited) notice of it was because 1999 was the year that the movie American Pie was released, and the two titles sounded similar enough (and shared an actress, but I wouldn't realize that for a few years) to me to associate them. I was a year away from high school, so of the two, American Pie interested me more. Also, the one person I knew who saw American Beauty detested it.
Nine years later (read: this year), I started reading a book on screenwriting and the author made numerous positive references to American Beauty. After years of hearing about how good the film was, and finally getting a few tidbits of information about the film, I decided to finally see it. I don't really remember what I was expecting, but what I saw outshone even my highest beliefs of what the movie could have been. It tells the story of a middle-aged man named Lester who feels that he is dead inside. He has a seemingly perfect life with a beautiful wife and a good-looking daughter. However, neither of them take him seriously; Carolyn, his wife, thinks he is pathetic while Jane suffers from a teenaged perspective of her parents.
When Lester and Carolyn attend a high school basketball game to encourage Jane's cheerleading, Lester sees Jane's friend Angela, a beautiful young girl whose desire to be special may be her greatest flaw, and falls head over heels in lust.
From there, Lester decides that he will start living his life the way he always dreamed he would (apparently, these dreams must have come from his teenage years, since he in many ways becomes a teenager... except with more emotional maturity).This post serves as a kind of overview of the film; rest assured, there is much more going on than I am saying here, but I will reserve the thematic analysis for the upcoming posts when I compare and contrast American Beauty with Six Feet Under. But this simple story of a man reigniting his life is full of ideas regarding the nature of life and death, tolerance, hidden meanings, suburban life and the appearance of perfection. Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes present us with an incredible story, which is brought to life by a cast of wonderful actors who all give award-worthy performances. I can't praise Kevin Spacey enough for his portrayal of Lester, but one of my favorite works in the film is that of Chris Cooper, who gives everything he's got to play Col. Frank Fitts, a retired marine whose struggles with his identity manifest as intolerance and anger.
If you haven't seen American Beauty yet, the point of this post was to get you interested. The upcoming discussions will likely involve a fair amount of spoilers, and I wanted to keep this one fairly clean so I would ruin as little as possible for those who haven't seen it. So see it as soon as possible, because there are a lot of interesting things about the film to deconstruct.
Up next: Deep down...
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