if a movie changes your life or the way you see it, it is said that it did a great job.

Rating: 9/10 (2 July 2020)

...Although it took several years for me to watch this one, I only knew that when it finished, something had changed.
In American Beauty we follow Lester, a forty-year-old with an unhappy life disguised as being perfect with his wife Carolyn and daughter Jane, just the protagonist that the cinema tries to avoid in his productions being the lie of the American dream, looking as if he had In a coma all his life, he decides to erase the monotony of his existence when he meets Angela, Jane's friend, no matter who he takes between the forces of his chaos, he embarks on a journey on the way to his death.
What I am most passionate about seeing this film is the need to destroy the concept of American perfection and what surrounds it, drops of work, marriage, home and ideal work in a rain of real misery, to achieve this we see everything through Lester's eyes, the most indifferent of the tape about what his life is concerned, he says it himself ... "I have lost something, I am not sure what it is but I know that I did not always feel so sedated", this man He begins to change everything to recover what he lost trying to have fewer responsibilities, less work, focusing on himself to break the chains that enslave him, in the first half hour of the film we see how there are people who do not try to show that they are happy like Jane but on the other hand there are people who lock themselves in a bubble of perfection to represent a good image and reflect success, just what Carolyn does. We can see the real despair of people like Carolyn in the "I'll sell this house today" scene and the final collapse of not achieving it, showing that happiness is a mask that each one forges; the film manages to criticize this system of perfection but not with the desire to make it appear as incorrect or unfair, but it does it so that the audience sees the reaction of these characters to it, it gives us stereotyped characters but capable for the public to identify themselves with them even the most selfish, a man tired of his work (and his life itself), a woman who seems to have everything under control but in reality has no stability, a teenager indifferent to what surrounds her and who does not she likes herself. The characters in the film are profound, objective, out of place, but each one has their own story and are presented in the same way, in addition to the fact that their very existence makes them influence the story in a great way, even if they are not the protagonists, something almost impossible to see in the movies where they go in a story line and forget what is around, here we have characters like Ricky Fitts, a cold boy who knows how to appreciate real beauty, his father, a strict colonel who represses his interior, Angela, a rogue girl who avoids being ordinary and the cause of Lester's awakening, just waking up surprises the audience since we are talking about a love 20 years apart but to me it seems that the relationship of Lester and Angela goes beyond a romance forbidden by age but the insecurity of a teenager and the crisis of a 42-year-old man who seeks to regain youth and his surroundings.
I love to see how the film is not only supported by an ingenious story with deep characters and masterful performances such as the Spacey that won him the Oscar, but the photography manages to give careful and precise shots that give it a unique touch, characteristic symbols such as roses and the fullness of red throughout the film, which could well reflect the perfection of materialism and the lust of the characters.
The film is not perfect and it is what it wants, as an audience we are immersed in the voice-over of the catharsis of a man who, when he dies, embarks us to the beauty of life and his shipwreck, a portrait of society, to worry about what that people think and finally understand beauty, not the American one, but everything, including a plastic bag dancing in the air.