America the Not-so-beautiful

Rating: 10/10 (9 December 2014)

Lester Burnham was born when Jung said the world changed. Lester was a young boy with our very own favorite memory (lying on the grass looking at clouds). He fell in love with Carolyn when she still had joy in her. But he got a job he hated to support a family inside a box with a white picket cage around it, a world where you can make money to buy stuff you don't need but you can't buy stuff to make you feel alive because it is not "sensible" (the red Firebird). Gender relations had turned upside down: his wife dominated him to where Less-stir stirred less. He literally sat in the back seat. Family broke apart: his daughter wished her parents could "get a life of their own." Computers proliferated: profits, losses, and suckers ran glowingly across Lester's face for 17 years. His boss was not a leader or a mentor: his boss was a Brad. With human leadership assassinated, corporate tentacles extended everywhere. Homosexuality became open—to some—scary, to others. Drugs earned a secure place in the culture: Lester gave up drugs maybe too soon and now the kids were into them, making it convenient to have a peddler next door. That's the setup.
Lester's libido got tickled by an inappropriate target: a young girl. He spoke back to his wife who mocked him in bed. That made him smile. He smoked with a young boy who was falling in love with his own daughter. He pounded a brad back into Brad when Brad asked him to write his own death warrant in a corporate reorganization. He quit: he quit to get alive for at least a moment before he was to die. He started working out. This was tragically mis-read by the guy next door. It's Col. Fitz who is the tragic one, not Lester. Lester dies with a smile on his face after he realizes he "feels great," that his daughter loves a sweet boy, that he doesn't care who is wife is f----ing. He becomes a father to the girl after whom he lusted: he wraps her in a protective blanket to set her free. He lets her be who she really is rather than who she thought she was supposed to be. They both grow up.
It's not a spoiler to say here that Lester dies: that's the first thing he tells us. You can't really die until you are alive—so the rest of the movie raises Lester from the deadened life he'd been trained to live. He—and hence we—look at life from above. We learn to smile with him: particularly when he delivers the sack of burgers. We see the perfect life is antiseptic white with vased slashes of reds, the way Carolyn would have it, or reds could fall like snow, the way fantasy has it, or the reds could be messy, messy, the way life has 'em.
Life messes up organization if we try to force ourselves into the back seat.