One of the best movies of all time.

Rating: 9/10 (3 April 2000)

What more can be said about this excellent film. Unlike a lot of Oscar winners in recent memory, this movie actually deserved every Oscar it won. It is a riveting portrait of American life in the suburbs. Probably there are few families quite as dysfunctional as this one but I bet almost all families can relate in a small way to the Burnhams.
Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening play the Burnhams, a middle aged couple who are going through their mid-life crises. Spacey is working for a magazine trying to sell advertising spots and Bening is a somewhat successful real estate agent. They are stuck in a loveless marriage and while Spacey's mid-life crisis revolves mostly around his physical appearance and sexual prowess, Bening is hungry for success and feels that she is a failure. They also have a teenage daughter who thinks her parents are crazy and has basically withdrawn from any type of relationship with them.
There are so many things happenning in this film that it would be hard to explore all of them at once. Spacey's character becomes infatuated with his daughter's best friend, the daughter developes a relationship with the "psycho" boy-next-door and Bening's character carries on a love/hate relationship with the town's truly successful Real Estate King.

What's most interesting though is that about half of the movie is way over the top while the other half is quite suttle. And it is the suttle parts that are the most interesting. The parts where you need to "look closer" as the tagline suggests. There are not a lot of answers here but there is a lot of food for thought and American Beauty is the kind of movie you are still thinking about days later.
With that said, there is one scene in the movie that seems totally out of place. It is one of the last scenes, so I can not fully describe it but it really felt out of place in this film. The scene involves Spacey and his next door neighbor. Other parts of the film were understated and they worked really well. For example, we don't really know what is wrong with Ricky's mother but she is barely conscious and her memory is shot. We do not know whether her condition is caused by being beaten or by some sort of degenerative disease but Ricky is obviously scared of ending up the same way. So when we see the hundreds of videotapes in Ricky's room and he gives the speech about beauty and never wanting to forget, we can understand the motivation for his behavior. This final scene however clashes with the style and pacing of the movie.
I was impressed by the acting, the story, the style of the movie and everything else. This movie is truly a must see. If it were not for that one little scene, this movie would be a perfect 10. As it is, I had to give it a 9/10 although I would have given it a 9.5 or even 9.75 if the system allowed for it.