Definitely Makes You Think!!

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2011)

American Beauty is a 1999 drama starring Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham, Thora Birch as Jane Burnham, and Mena Suvari as Angela Hayes. Lester, his daughter Jane, and his wife Carolyn seem to be a normal happy family to everyone on the outside. They have good jobs, and live in a nice house in nice neighborhood. However, on the inside Lester has become depressed, and with no help from his family who seems to hate him, he continues to fall into a deeper depression. Carolyn is obsessed with her job and materialistic things, and has a budding relationship with a rival real estate agent. Jane is a typical hormonal teenager, and begins a relationship with Ricky Fits, the new neighbor boy who is a drug dealer with a very strict and homophobic marine father. At a basketball game, Lester meets his daughter's friend Angela, and instantly becomes infatuated with her. After this meeting, the movie takes a twist and Lester starts making drastic changes in his life. Some of these changes seem good for him, but not everyone else agrees.
The best theme for this movie would be happiness. It is wanted by every character in this movie, they all just want it in a different way. Carolyn believed that to be successful you had to pretend to be happy on the outside, so she expected Lester and Jane to act the same way. This way of thinking didn't carry on throughout the whole movie, because when Lester made the changes in his life he made sure his family and everyone else knew it, he refused to be bullied by his wife and daughter, and made sure they understood that. He was the only character in this movie that did what he had to do to make himself happy. Keeping on track with this theme, a movie similar to American Beauty would be Fight Club. The main character in both movies is a depressed man who hates his life and mostly everything in it. Both characters make drastic changes, including quitting their job, to try to find happiness. You could say that both Lester and Edward Norton's character in Fight Club are a bit crazy.
Two film techniques that help support this theme in American Beauty would be music, and motifs. Throughout most of the movie whenever Lester is seeing Angela either in person or in his dreams there is music playing in the background, most of the time this music sounds whimsical and grabs the viewer's attention. We notice that every time Lester sees Angela he seems happier. Another technique used is motifs. Throughout the movie the same "idea" of Angela is shown in Lester's mind, a sort of sexual fantasy. He is usually shown smiling happily whenever he is having these "ideas." Also, there are always rose petals in these scenes, another pattern used throughout the whole movie.
To me, this whole movie is about trying to find happiness. It just shows that people go about it in different ways. Some people are completely fine living an unhappy life as long as they seem successful to everyone else on the outside. While some people will do whatever it takes to find happiness, even if this means turning their life upside down.