American Beauty impacted my life

Rating: 9/10 (18 September 2019)

Middle-aged Lester has an epiphany about his dull life, and in the 20 years after American Beauty's release it seems Hollywood experienced one as well. This gritty, stylish and irreverent film is a shift from previous decades and the typical way that major studios do business.
Lester experiences a series of shocks that he surprisingly takes in stride; fired from his job, cuckolded by his wife Carolyn, taunted by his teen daughter Jane, and more. Fantasy comes to the rescue for him in the form of Jane's friend Angela. While his world and the people around him crumble, Lester aims to live up to Angela's positive impressions of him and prove it is never too late to get it back.
American Beauty impacted my life. After seeing it with my then wife Jennifer in 1999 in Arlington, Virginia, I vowed not to find myself in Lester's situation. It influenced me to be a park ranger even though it is "McDonalds work" to her.
Though many of the characters in American Beauty act trapped, some such as Lester begin to realize that it is useless to try to live as others think or demand you ought to live. When they cast aside the pressure and control they are greeted with hostility. "You can't go around doing whatever you feel like," says one of the manipulators, "there are rules in life." But there is also so much beauty in the world, and Lester and those like him vow to immerse themselves in it.
American Beauty is an intriguing and artful portrait of suburban dysfunction and a middle-class underworld, but also inspiration for rising above circumstances. Compelling film techniques include falling flower petals, spotlighting, fantasy sequences, jarring music, mist, slow-motion, and more. Kevin Spacey(Lester) and Annette Bening (Carolyn) are perfectly cast. The film earned 25 times its estimated production cost ($350 billion, which is 120 times the entire budget of the agency I work for, the National Park Service). By non-Hollywood standards the film still is somewhat tame and I wish the film makers had been even more daring.