Instant Classic.

Rating: 10/10 (8 May 2010)

American beauty is a reality drama film, telling the story of a middle aged man, Lester Burnham, going through the mid life crisis.
In Lester's own words, the midlife crisis felt to Lester as if he "was in a coma for 20 years, and just now waking up".
The films starts with Lester's introducing the audience to his life, telling how unhappy he is, and vaguely announcing that he will be dead in less than a year.
Lester suffers from the distance he feels growing between him and his family; wife, Carolyn Burnham (Annette Benning), and daughter Jane Burnham (Thora Birch).
Similarly, he feels that he is valueless at work, although he has been working for the same firm for the last fourteen years.
On the personal level, we see no friends in his life, adding more to his isolation and boredom.
Faced with all of these factors, Lester decides that it's time to take matters in his own hands, and gain back control of his own life.
In his journey to gain this control of his life, he quits his job, changes his car, starts smoking weed, working out and eating right, partially in effort to attract his daughter's teenager friend.
Along comes a new resident to his street, Col. Fits USMC (Chris Cooper) and his family. His son Ricky Fits (who is an undercover drug dealer) starts dating Jane.
The unhappy wife with the recent changes is now cheating on Lester, while the over protective off his family Col. Fits is concerned with his son's behavior.
Lester's efforts to attract the teenager friend Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari) are eventually successful, just to find out that she is a clueless child.
As Lester promised at the intro of the film, he gets murdered at the closing scene, over a very ironic misunderstanding, audience tends to be upset over what happened, but Lester's voice reassures them, that it's not worth it; he is now able to see true beauty in life, and "it's hard to stay mad when there is so much beauty in the world."
The plot and the entire movie scenes remained faithful to the movie theme, as a realistic drama film with a glimpse of sarcastic humor. There was no impossible (physically or emotionally) events in the entire film, in fact, the film came so plausible and realistic, a similar scenario can happen anywhere anytime across the united states, and thus, it was titles American Beauty.