Encouragement of an Extremely Involved Mind; Moving

Rating: 9/10 (16 September 2016)

Never has a movie been so difficult for me, personally, to understand in full length. Normally with a film; I point out the positives and the negatives but I am willing to make an attempt to explain the motif and the ever so influential symbol of the rose.
American Beauty balances the personal tragedies in the minds of individuals with the evident satire of a regular depressed American family in the backdrop of the late 1990s. As you progress through the film you suddenly realize that each character is struggling with their own personal debacle with themselves. This could be as simple as harboring the insecurities that tag along with teenage angst (Jane Turnham) to creating a false image of yourself as a burly "man" battling with his sexuality (Frank Fits).
The true meaning of beauty in this film is the realization of the small things in the characters' lives that make them who they really are. When Lester Dunham finally comes to terms with everything going on in the time of his mid-life crisis; he recognizes that everything that he wanted (besides freedom from his corporate job) was already in his life, but he had just merely skipped over it in the craze of everything. He finally finds his happiness in the end when he sees this which allows him to locate his own oasis of peace and tranquility before his death.
The story-line following Lester's development is clearly the most important to the plot of the movie itself, but none of his advancements would have been made without Ricky Fits, the strange boy with the split persona, and his ability to force emancipation upon himself so that he did not suffer through what he didn't wish to. The fact that Ricky basically held the answer to all of the characters' problems in the story is also critical to remember. He stated that "there is so much beauty in the world". This isn't discovered by the main protagonists until later in the film where they identify that trying to alter their ways would not find them the beauty in their lives that they had forgotten and skimmed over prior to the lapse of attentiveness.
The realization that I came to, embarrassingly enough, was that the title of the film itself was not focusing on the beauty of Angela Hayes and the obsession Lester had with her during his mid-life crisis, but with the beauty that lies within everything the protagonists already have. The forced personality change that many of them experience is practically the same as not even containing a personality within themselves. This movie focuses more on the theme than anything else which is what makes it so magnificent. Even the original score and the lighting and camera angles add a feeling of simplicity to the problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Overall, American Beauty and it's performances by Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, and Wes Bentley were inexplicably amazing and the film indubitably earned the world renown Best Picture Oscar.
Remember, Look Closer