A great movie of our times.

Rating: Null/10 (25 September 1999)

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) plays a middle aged father whose role in life had been eroded at home and at work. Times have changed and have passed him by. His solution? Simply let go of responsibility and live out the dreams and desires of his youth. He may be older but he's got the money to do it and nothing to lose. Or so he thinks. Burnhams wife (Annette Benning) is too high on her own career aspirations to take notice of her husbands midlife crisis of sorts. Having totally embraced her role as a nineties woman exploring the limits of gender equality while actually undergoing a role reversal as the main bread winner of the family, she is essentially blind to her husband's dilemma. The few glimpses she does get she matches with threats of divorce, to which her husband reminds her just how much her present career has been leveraged by his own self sacrifice. And of course, stuck in the middle is the daughter who considers her father's recent behavior changes as downright creepy, especially since her teenage girlfriend is ground zero for his youthful fantasies.
But what makes the story truly fascinating is the character of Ricky Fitts, the Burnhams teenage neighbor whose interest in filming the world around him extends into the private world of the Burnhams. He alone is in a position to understand, in his own unique way, the problems of the Burnhams. His video recorder is like a key that allows him to capture what is missed by many: the hidden beauty in nature and people, just waiting to be shared and absorbed by the voyeur.
Similar to Mrs. Burnham, Ricky's dad has also been a victim to his career (as an ex marine colonel). Yet like Mr. Burnham, he has been left behind by changing times: his utter contempt for his homosexual neighbors, who the film wonderfully portrays as really the only truly happy and normal people in the local neighborhood, despite how society may view their sexuality.
Mrs Fitts is just the opposite of Mrs. Burnham, she has been frozen in time, probably a time more familiar to the fifties, and is totally subservient to her husband's world. She is basically a zombie, with none of Mrs. Burnhams dreams or goals, but like Mrs Burnham she is without the essential emotions to understand what is happening in the world because she is locked up in hers.
The film doesn't offer the viewer any new insight into life, only confirms what we probably feel or have felt. But it does so in a manner that's very fresh. It doesn't preach to us the way things should be, rather it puts a cross section of life under the microscope to be dissected and analyzed. American Beauty could have been a little shorter I think, and some parts seemed to drag out the message a little too long, but the acting, especially Spacey is very good.