American Beauty
A film classic that explores lives trapped within the American Dream
David Hamilton explores what makes this memorable film especially moving and poignant, and how it sometimes can take a film to give us a better look at our own lives.
"Sometimes I feel like there is so much beauty in this world...my heart fills up like a balloon about to burst," says the disembodied voice of Lester Burnham, just a guy with nothing left to loose.
Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey (who won an Oscar for the role), is a complex character that starts a chain of events that turns his life and those around him inside out making them finally live in the moment. The people in Burnham’s suburban neighbourhood finally stop going though the motions.
Middle-aged Burnham decides that his sexless, corporate, boring, sober, square life is not a life. He rapidly goes the other direction. He black mails his boss into a severance package, starts smoking pot again, starts working out, starts relaxing, starts breathing, starts distancing himself from the toxins of his life, starts really living. In turn, his wife, who is obsessed with her real-estate career has an affair, buys a gun
For the first time, these characters with their manicured, cubicled, white picket-fenced lives are faced with reality.
American Beauty touches on the misunderstanding between generations. At all stages of life, despite levels of experience, at times one feels that same anxiety that a teenager feels on his first date or the fear of the unknown when one is facing their last second of life. The characters in the movie are re-awakened to their feelings in very moving performances.
Rickey (played by Wes Bently) is the teenager who moves in next door. He is a strangely self-confident, "weird" kid who video records random moments of beauty that he sees in his neighbour’s window, a homeless woman dieing, or a plastic bag dancing in the wind.
Rickey and the other supporting characters have a depth of complexity unseen in the main characters of most movies. Between the disillusioned daughter, to the flirtatious high school cheerleader, to the strict military father, these performances go far beyond simple caricatures and strengthen the effect of the movie tremendously.
Not taking a backseat to the drama is the magnificent original soundtrack by Thomas Newman that has a simplicity and uniqueness that is intriguing and goes well with the narrative. It is complemented with the superb songs of Neil Young, the Guess Who and the Who, bands whose revolutionary zeal represented the freedom that Burnham’s generation had lost in exchange for mini-vans and double-tall no-fat vanilla lattes.
It explores what is behind closed doors of suburban houses, the tragedies that we don't understand. We are just looking through windows obscured by rain falling on its pane. It makes us open the window and see the beauty in our lives.
