Red is the dominant color of American Beauty

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 1999)

I am sorry not to be specific about the story, the characters, the set design and the music. So many good articles have already been written on these subjects. I would like to insist on a detail - a way to thank the director and his team for their superb work. When you close you eyes, after the screening of American Beauty, what you see in your mind is "red". Red is the dominant color of this film: red are the roses, the petals of roses and also red is the blood of a killed person. Light Red is also the wall of bricks in front of the plastic bag is flying. Red is the desire of this adolescent, red is the background of the dream, red is the color of life - the blood. Red is the tempo of all this film. Red is the red line of desire: life desire, sexual desire.
It's an impressive first film which the way to direct is much better than the script. The script is intelligent but already done many times about middle-class in suburb. The director adds a visual finesse which surpass the caricatur and gives to the characters and the story a lightness and a deepess which are poetic.
PS: please change quickly the trailer which is vulgar and boring because it insists on the comedy side of the movie and not at all on the finesse and poetry of the characters. With this trailer, I was not interested to see the film: it looks like so many other movies of this type of stories. But after I read the article in The New York Times "A Wunderkind Discovers the Wonders of Film" Sep. 12,99 - I desire to see the movie because Mr. Sam Mendes speaks so well about his work on this film, so simply and directly that I was moved and interested to see what he could have done