Yar, you be here: American Beauty (The Awards Edition) > Customer Reviews

American Beauty (The Awards Edition) Customer Reviews (34 - 36 of 109 Reviews)

Middle aged crisis and the mystical nature of life
The movie begins in an ominous way with the video taping of girl who is asks a friend to kill her father. Not meaning to be a spoiler we are being set up by this scene.

The next scene we see, the actual beginning of the movie, is an aerial shot of a tree lined street as Kevin Spacey begins to narrate the story. He tells us that he is 42 and "in less than a year he will be dead"
The introductory narration is done in somewhat of a funny sarcastic deadpan.

Lester Burnham (played by Spacey) lives in a nice neighborhood and is married to his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) who trys to keep a picture perfect house that would make Martha Stewart proud.

Lester bemoans his joyless life but as Lester says in his narration before the story begins it is never too late to make a change.
We learn Lester is stuck at a job he hates and we see him spending his days on the phone dealing with clients.
His wife is a driven woman who puts on a false front. Lester and Carolyn are obviously following two different paths although both are going through a middle age crisis. Most of the adults in this movie are portrayed as living lives that are lies.

They have a teenage daughter, Jane, going through her own painful transition in her life.

Camera work, music and editing come together to humorously highlight the absurdity of the life style Carolyn has made for her family and with which Lester until recently has gone along.

New neighbors move in next door to the Burnhams who will play an important role in their lives. The new family is run by a tyrannical military man.

But as the story proceeds three new characters come into their lives: for Annette Bening it is "The Real Estate King", for their daughter it is the boy who moves in next door and for Lester it is his daughter's best friend.

Three events precipitate what comes to follow: the arrival of the new neighbors, a cheerleading performance at a basket ball game and a party for real estate agents.

The Burnhams travel to the basket ball game to see their daughter perform and their Lester becomes smitten with his daughter's best friend and so he begins an obsession with this Lolita.

At a party for real estate agents Carolyn puts does he best to be the picture of confidence (Bening is quite brilliant as her performance of the confident real estate agent which borders on the surreal and absurd) and does her best to schmooze and to cozy up to "The Real Estate King". Lester who is bored out of his wits at the party meets Ricky Fitz, the boy next door. Ricky's is a waiter at the party but the job is really just a cover for his very profitable business as a marijuana dealer. Lester and Ricky step out back where Lester is reintroduced to pot.
Later we find Ricky has a fascination with the Burnham's daughter something she learns when she discovers him surreptitiously filming her.

Other than Lester, Ricky is the most pivotal character in the story. He is constantly beaten by his father, did a stint in military school and after nearly beating a fellow student to death spends time in a mental hospital. Through it all the suffering he has gone though he find himself on a spiritual journey seeing the world as being overwhelmingly beautiful and is now wise beyond his years. His hobby is video taping everything he sees especially the beauty of the world. Included in the beautiful things that fascinate him are the eyes of a homeless man who had just died. To paraphrase Ricky says he could see God looking back at him through the eyes of the dead man. There is a beautiful sequence where Ricky shows Jane one of his favorite tapes - a bag dancing in the wind. Despite his criminal profession Ricky can be seen as a young holy man. Also he seems to symbolize the movie's creators themselves as his fascination with the lens and Ricky's can be seen as being one and the same.

Things progress quickly. Carolyn continues with her quest for the good life and ends up having and affair with the "Real Estate King" whereas Lester quits his job and blackmails his boss into giving him a large severance package and starts working at a fast food restaurant. There is definite a clash of paths, of values and cultures between Lester and his wife.

Lester buys himself the car of his boyhood dreams, listens to the music of his youth, smokes pot and lifts weights. He also continues his obsession with his daughters' friend until finally the two of them come together. (during this important sequence we are treated to Neil Young's poignant "Don't Let it Bring You Down" sung softly in the background). She offers herself to him willingly but Lester refuses and in that instant things seem to come together for Lester both realizing his responsibility as an adult and his love for his family. It is a type of epiphany for Lester.

Immediately there after Lester has his brains blown out. To tell you the name of the assailant would take away the surprise.

But the fact that the lovable Spacey character is now dead is portrayed as a joyous thing and his narration that concludes the movie which sums up his life in a very moving, joyous and hopeful. And in the end everyone seems to experience a type of salvation.

Some of the movie is social satire but the overwhelming message of the movie is the holiness and mystical nature of life and the idea that life and death are on a continuum - very much in tune with poets such as William Blake, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.

A wonderful choice of music accentuates the mystical feeling of the movie including the main score which is made up of percussion instruments and that has a somewhat oriental feel to it.

So what does the title refer to? Does it refer to the roses Carolyn tends or the Lolita Lester pursues? I think it is neither. America Beauty for this reviewer seems to refer to American life. Although is may be materialistic and filled with disappointments has a holiness to it.

Highly recommended





Pretty Silly, But Fun
(...)

The first time I saw American Beauty it was the last in three consecutive weekend movie run. The other two films were Fight Club and Bringing Out the Dead. All three films are about men trying to come to terms to what it means to be a man in America in this day and age. Fight Club finds meaning in deconstructing everything down to base needs, feeling through pain. Bringing Out the Dead gives meaning to its character through drug use, but is was in American Beauty that I found some sense of hope.

In the film, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) plays a middle aged, middle class suburbanite, with seemingly everything he could desire. He has a good, well paying job; a beautiful wife (Annette Bening); a large luxurious house; and a lovely daughter (Thora Birch). Yet, with all of this he is not happy. In fact, all of these things are not quite what they seem. His employer is facing cut backs, and he may soon lose his job. He marriage is in shambles, and his daughter openly hates him. Early, we see him masturbating in the shower, in narration; he states this is the highpoint of his day. All is not well in the house of Burnham.

All of this changes when Lester meets Angela (Mena Suvari), his daughter, Jane's gorgeous, cheerleader friend. On first seeing Angela during a cheer routine, Lester feel a special, lustful connection. Later that night, Lester overhears Angela playfully tell Jane that if he would only work out, he would be sexy. His lust over this teenage vixen becomes the catalyst for the film and Lester's very life.

Soon after Lester quits his job, in fact he bilks the company for a year's salary by threatening to disclose scandalous information that he has become privy to. He begins smoking pot, buys a hot rod.. He plays with remote control cars, takes a job at a fast food joint, and of course does start working out. In every way he reverts back to his teenage years. Even the soundtrack begins blaring out classic rock tunes from the 1970's. Finally after years, decades even, of feeling low, miserable, not alive, he feels great.

This reversion back to his glory days is only the beginning. It is a reversion back to the days when he had fun, when he felt alive. But he is not a man who will stop there. This is just a beginning point to a life long conversion of living a full life, as opposed to a life full of the right things, but that is ultimately empty. Or it would be if he was not shortly dead (this is not nearly the spoiler you might think it is, for Lester announced his death within the first minutes of the film.) Towards the end of the film we can see that Lester is already outgrowing his childish behavior. When he yells at his daughter, he immediately feels the sting of regret. When given the chance to indulge in his lusts, he backs away, understanding that it is not right. Just as the music changed to classic rock with the first change, here it has changed again, turning into the same classic rock being covered by newer, contemporary artists.

Many will probably say that using the lust for a teen, and illicit drug us as a catalyst for change, is not a change for the better. I can already hear my mother scolding me for having seen the movie, much less reviewed it from 2,000 miles away in Oklahoma. Yet, here it works, and works well. I don't believe the film is saying that these things should be the means to a change, these things only served as means for this character to break free from the rut that had become his life. There is a telling scene where Lester and his wife are overcome with sexual desire. As he dips his wife to kiss her, she stops the embrace because he is near to spilling his glass of wine on an expensive couch. An argument ensues with Lester proclaiming that "it's just a couch," while his wife is horrified at the thought of ruining said couch. There lies one of the central themes of the film. That these characters are so wrapped up in the material that they lose sight of the better pleasure of life, including love making.

It is not a perfect film. The Burnham's neighbor, Col. Fritts (Chris Cooper) seems a caricatured archetype. His plays a hateful, homophobe who really carries deep rooted homosexual tendencies is too outlandish to be considered real. Though it must be said the part is played marvelously by Chris Cooper. Jane's speech about being a freak too, may move the young kids who consider themselves the nonconformist, shy-type, but it is too after-school special for my tastes.

I've left out some of the best scenes and an important character, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley). He plays the drug dealing son of Col. Fritts, who likes to record everything on his video camera. There is a moving scene in which he and Jane watch an old tape of his of a plastic bag floating through the air. It is a moving, poetic scene that conjures up thought of the futility of life and its very beauty. It is that type of movie. It creates beautiful, moving, simple scenes that bring a sense of hope to life, while at the same time, showing the ultimate horror of living it.

(...)

But it has its flaws...
Namely, there was no reason to show Mena Suvari's breasts-a comment made by another reviewer that I hadn't thought about until I read that particular review. Also, are we to think that Kevin Spacey's character WOULD have had sex with an underage girl had he NOT found out she was a virgin??? This point is completely ignored and, upon reflection, takes some of the movie's luster away. However, I found the movie to be great nonetheless. So much of it rang true, even amongst the cliches, that it made a lasting impression. Given the passion that this film has created, I suggest renting it first, though I think most will end up buying it.

Previous Page

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Next Page