A Useless Life

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2014)

It's a sign of how good an actor Kevin Spacey is that he makes Lester Burch so appealing, because Burch is a contemptible man who deserves all the unhappiness he has. When we meet him, he shows no interest in anything or anyone outside himself. That's his misfortune, because he has no inner resources. He has no ideas and no thoughts, only feelings of loss and unfocused resentment. There is not a book in his house. He has no apparent religion and no apparent politics. He doesn't even have a hobby to give some artificial structure and meaning to his life.
His present condition is the natural consequence of the youth he remembers with nostalgic longing. Lester Burch is 42 in the fall of 1998, when American Beauty begins. He is the exact contemporary of Kevin Arnold and the kids in the basement on That 70s Show. He would have graduated from high school the year Nixon resigned and from college at the bottom of the Sour Seventies. He remembers a few political catch phrases about fascism from his childhood, but he mourns the passing of no youthful ideals and no youthful ambitions. Burch describes himself as a frat boy who drank and screwed his way through college. The youthful joy whose loss he now laments is no more than the joy of a constant frat party -- life as a beer commercial. Once marriage and fatherhood ended the party, Burch drifted into his dead end job and sterile family life because he had never prepared himself for anything better.
When his balls galvanize his brain into life, Burch can conceive no better rebellion than regressing to the frat boy he remembers having been. He abandons any obligation to support his wife and daughter. He gets a minimum wage, minimum effort job. He listens to the bad rock and roll of his youth. He buys the car he always wanted as a teenager. He spends the rest of his money on weed and toys. He spends the rest of his time on restoring his body to what it should have been at age 19, so that a 16 year old hottie will want to have sex with him. He takes as his model the teen-aged marijuana dealer next door, who can be fearless because he has no responsibilities to anyone but himself. He deserts his family as completely as he can without moving out of the house where he lives, rent free, on what his wife earns selling other houses.
Lester Burch, in short, is a man who never grew up and who feels that the world owes him a party. He is useless to himself and others, and there is no particular reason for him to continue to take up air that somebody better could breathe. He only has one moment of redemption -- when he finally sees the 16 year old object of his fantasies as a confused, frightened, vulnerable human being instead of a sex toy, he has enough residual decency to treat her decently. That isn't enough. Burch cannot go back to 19. His daughter is about to run away and his wife to throw him out. He has boxed himself into a dead end, from which his fortuitous, though foreshadowed, murder is a convenient exit. While his death may be messy, it will be no loss to anyone once his brains are wiped off the kitchen tile.