A near perfect film that is funny, touching, and well acted. (SPOILERS)

Rating: Null/10 (4 April 2004)

SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!
I for one was looking forward to American Beauty. I had seen the trailer many times and I enjoyed it. I also really like Kevin Spacey, Mena Suvari & Thora Birch. But I figured when I rented it it would probably be a OK film but nothing more. I was pleasantly surprised that some critics where wrong (once again) about the film, but most were right and I was in for a very heartfelt and touching experience. With so many films aimed at air-headed, shallow 15 year old teenyboppers, silly family comedies aimed at young children and violent war films aimed at older men, this is, not to sound cliche, a breath of fresh air. When I first saw this, I was 16, and I wanted something more intellectual, better acted with characters that actually had at least some depth and didn't insult teenage girls intelligence.
American Beauty is one of the finer mainstream release movies I have seen all in the year of 1999. The movie is extremely enjoyable for both teenagers and adults and is very touching. The movie is about the Burnham family. The Burnham family is the ordinary suburban family but in a way the not so ordinary. As the movie first starts out, the family lives in suburbia where they are pretending to happy living in a small town and feel right at home (or at least try to). Even though they are not rich, they are unhappy. So then Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), our main character who is a 42-year-old man whose middle class, suburban doldrums far exceed the standard middle-age crisis. His fourteen-year career at a magazine publishers is going nowhere, his perfectionist realtor wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), drives him crazy and his angst ridden teenager daughter, Jane (Thora Birch) barely communicates with him, simply writing him off as "weird."
Things soon begin to change around the Burnham household, however, upon the arrival of several new people who shake things up. While their neighbors on one side are a gay couple, Jim (Scott Bakula) and Jim (Sam Robards), the once vacant house on the other has now been occupied by the Fitts family. Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) is a stern, military man whose wife, Barbara (Allison Janney), seems to be in state of domestic shell shock.
Little do they know that their eighteen-year-old son, Ricky (Wes Bentley), a boy so obsessed with life and beauty that they once institutionalized him for two years, is actually a successful drug dealer with a penchant for videotaping everything, including Jane next door.
While that initially creeps her out, Jane soon starts to find Ricky interesting once she gets to know him. That only disgusts Jane's gorgeous cheerleader friend, Angela (Mena Suvari), who thinks Ricky's a pervert although she herself claims she's slept with men just in an attempt to further her aspiring modeling career. When Lester meets both Angela and Ricky, he finds a stirring within himself that he long thought dormant and perhaps dead. With Angela, who openly flirts with him, Lester goes into hormonal overdrive and constantly fantasizes about her, when not pumping iron to get into shape and make himself more attractive to her. With Ricky, Lester finds a kindred spirit whose carefree attitude about life and work -- as well as the expensive pot he sells him -- causes Lester to change his outlook on life. Having successfully blackmailed his former company, Lester sets out to have a good time, not caring that his wife might be seeing local real estate king, Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher).

As everyone reacts to Lester's newfound attitude with shock, he must deal with the fact that Carolyn doesn't like his new self, that Jane half-jokingly asked Ricky to kill him, and that Colonel Fitts becomes suspicious of Lester's involvement with his son. This is when American Beauty gets started and lots of comedic, touching and moving moments proceed.
The acting was very good in this film. I enjoyed Kevin Spacey playing in a different role. Sure he was his comedic/dramatic self for some of the movie, but he was also the caring & careless father for the other part. It was great to see him show some emotions. Annette Bening was also good as Carolyn. I really felt she was a perfectionist and struggling as though they were her own little problems. Thora Birch, who was great in Now & Then, played the confused and bitterly unhappy teenage daughter Jane in the film. Jane was basically dealing with her weird father, perfectionist mother, her perfect, gorgeous, model cheerleader friend who is becoming romantically involved with her father (gross!) and her beautiful weird, drug dealing boyfriend Ricky Fitts who is also becoming involved with her father. The downside to her character was she wasn't in the film as much as I would have liked to see her in it since she's such a wonderful actress but while she was in the film, she played her character very well. I think that she should have at least got an Oscar nod for Jane, I could definitely relate to her character in a lot of ways, since I am a teenage girl myself. Mena Suvari played the feisty cheerleader friend Angela and she played her character well, even though at times I doubt she played the role since it seemed like the perfect role for her. Wes Bentley was great as the weird, beauty and life obsessed Ricky who was mad at his dad for not thinking about anyone except himself throughout the movie and trying to deal with fitting in and his relationships with both Jane and Lester. And as for the rest of the actors, well they were probably the finest actors I have ever seen in a mainstream movie and all played the roles wonderfully. I also have the mention Allison Janney, who I don't really like but I liked her in this role. Maybe its because the whole film all she did was really be caring. You can't help but feel sympathetic toward her because she had this son who is really hard to understand and unpredictable.
The script was great! Alan Ball, who wrote episodes of Cybill, which was a pretty bad television show, has made a great recovery from that film by writing this one. I enjoyed the movie a lot as I am sure you have already picked up from my review so far. I liked the script because it showed how real suburban family life can be. It was a nice movie which showed the family going from normal to very weird, wacky and crazy. It was nice to see a script that mixed both comedic and dramatic moments so perfectly. I would like to say good job Alan Ball I applaud your work on this script, keep it up.
The director, Sam Mendes, did a great job on directing the movie. He knew how to put the movie together. I was surprised Sam Mendes did such a great job on this film since his last film before this was the awful made-for-television movie Company. It's amazing that he too was able to catch the emotions that were in the movie. The movie portrays the average family but in today's world I guess we can say the not so average family and how life is for them. It's a very moving movie as I already mentioned above and the director really caught all the difficulties and good moments in the Burnhams lives.
So in conclusion, American Beauty was every thing I hoped it to be. It was better than I expected it to be and touched me very deeply. I can relate to the movie in some sense since I also live in suburbia and I see some of the problems arise although my family situation isn't like the movie on all levels. There isn't as much love and caring in the family, but yeah it's the truth, not all suburban families are all happy, cookie cutter and have minor problems, as there should be in the family. And even though this movie's a quite unlikely suburban situation, it's still more likely than The Brady Bunch or shows and films like that with giant stereotypes, because the characters in American Beauty have depth. It touched me because my family could have been like the Burnhams, which are at least interesting. Not like I'd want my father being like Lester or my neighbors being like the Fitts. I think that's why I really got emotional at the end of the film and cried because it's sad but it's not really that sad that someone should cry at the end. I liked the movie a lot. It was very feel good, shows a lot emotions and comedic. It's not comedic in a silly, slap-stick sort of way but funny in a suburban type of way by portraying how a family should be. The film made my top 5 movies of 1999 list and I am glad to see it did so well at the box office and won Best Picture Oscar even though some dumb critics panned it, but most liked it (it got a 89% fresh on rotten-tomatoes.com). I cannot see anyone walking out of this film saying its bad. It's a film, which I think almost anyone can enjoy. It's not full of stupidity but has funny moments. It has some drama, which is always good in a film as well. To me the film is the perfect suburban drama/dark comedy. I give American Beauty a very high rating of a 9/10.