Self-Liberating

Rating: 10/10 (13 August 2013)

"American Beauty" is one of my favorite films, for me watching it feels kind of like a pat in the back, like I've found someone who thinks just like me, one of the best feelings there is next to being distracted.
Its the story of Lester Burnham, a man who's going to die a year from when we first meet him. He wants to set himself free from everything that's making him feel depressed while also feeling attracted to his daughter's best friend.
It's one of the "self-liberating" films that came out in 1999, along with "Fight Club" and Office Space. A sub-genre I think first started with François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows", a film that isn't afraid to speak to its audience and really touch people. "American Beauty" is a film that turns to you and asks "How do you feel?".
Talking about this movie could go on forever, its obvious that movies like "Lolita" inspired it apart from others I'm not really sure of like "Kes", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Blue Velvet", "Citizen Kane", and "The Godfather: Part II".
I hate to mention every single technical aspect of a movie in a review, but this film sort of deserves having everyone who worked on it mentioned. The performances in this are all amazing, no character is left underdeveloped and we leave the film thinking that we actually know these characters, something very hard to find in films (e.g. Dazed and Confused).
I can find identify myself very much with the characters, specially Lester (Kevin Spacey) and Ricky Fits (Wes Bentley), and even the others I can understand up to some level. Like Lester's wife, a person who's lost herself to materialism while striving for perfection. Or Lester's daughter, someone who feels lonely and ignored by her parents.
The simplicity in the cinematography fits the story perfectly, unlike films like "Magnolia" that give a human story the wrong cinematographic approach and make it feel more like a thriller or comedies like "The Big Lebowski" that turn away from the comedy and give the film more style over substance. The score and the soundtrack also add a lot to the film, letting us know the state of mind of the characters or enhancing a feeling to the audience.
Finally, it's hard not to love the beautiful and poetic script by Alan Ball (my favorite writer after Charlie Kaufman), dealing with themes of death, materialism, and redemption. It's a film that shows the beauty in cinema as an art form, in the way that what the film says couldn't be said as well in any other medium. For example, had it been made as a play, we wouldn't understand the characters as well for the intimacy that cinema gives us would be lost.
I'd recommend it to anyone who liked "The Ice Storm", "The Virgin Suicides", "Little Children", "Lost in America", "The Kids are All Right", "Donnie Darko", "Lost in Translation", Wes Anderson movies, or any film I mentioned before.