Great movie, but I'm not sure it's timeless.

Rating: 8/10 (30 May 2001)

As much as I love this movie (8/10), I have this nagging feeling that twenty or thirty years from now our grandchildren and movie historians will laugh at us for buying into it. There's way too much of a baby-boomer/overgrown hippie mentallity. For god's sake, The Grateful Dead had an album with the same title (and I have a sneaking suspicion that Mendes and Ball are playing off that by making Lester grateful that he's dead).
Spoilers: The biggest problem with the movie is that most of the character shifts are way too formulaic and predictable to warrant the tagline, "Look closer." Basically, whatever the character denies the most is what he or she really is. Annette Bening tries to put on a strong facade because she is really weak. The boy's father hates gays because he is gay (anybody else think that is insulting?--admittedly, though, our society does make it extremely stressful to be gay, but there's hardly any lead up to it, and I disagree wholeheartedly with the DVD commentary by the filmmakers in which they said they needed to keep it a surprise by excising or trimming sequences that hinted at it). And of course, Mena Suvari's character is a virgin because she keeps talking about all the men she's slept with (funny, but even though she's a liar, I still believe the part about men staring at her as a young child).
Lester, on the other hand, doesn't change at the end of the movie--he changes at the beginning. In fact, the majority of the movie is a very interesting, near-brilliant look at the consequences of this change--a man trying to be a teenager again. By the end of the movie, when he returns to being a father (as the moviemakers point out) when he's lying on top of Suvari, we understand a lot about mortality and the pains of growing older (and it's a lot more than no longer being able to have the pretty young girls). In fact, by the end, Lester had become so earnest and honest that I couldn't imagine him saying what he says in the voice over without him actually meaning it--despite the fact that it is obviously satiric ("You will someday"--right, after you're dead like him. That's too late, hence the satire).
The other interesting story surrounds Lester's daughter, who seems to be repulsed by the neighbor boy. Of course, she ends up being in love with him because he in turn is not the creepy pervert he sets himself up to seem. However, they (as a kind of coming-of-age subplot that parallels and counterpoints Lester's main story of the ending of life) change in numerous other ways, like real people. Despite the viciousness of the violence surrounding it, my favorite scene in the whole movie is when she lets him watch her undress--a very tender and beautiful/sad scene, one of the best pseudo-sexual awakenings on film.
Spoiler: By the way, didn't anybody catch that the American Beauty rose that permeates the movie (especially Lester's daydreams of Suvari's character) is representative of Annette Bening's character? Which would mean that Suvari's character also represents Bening's character (the young one that mooned police helicopters). I haven't decided yet whether that's brilliant or formulaic.