Drama Americana

Rating: 7/10 (30 August 2017)

While American Beauty seems to have lost the punch it once had, there are still aspects of the film that hold true. The psychology of the film, through the eyes of each of its characters, is insightful and intriguing. There are aspects of each character that are relatable: the desire to live, to be seen and understood, to succeed, to be desired, and so on.
The story, as told by a now dead Lester (Kevin Spacey), explores the mundane, and the natural desire to escape it, be something more and break free from the expectations of society. Spacey has lost all passion in his life. He feels smothered by his job, his family, and whatever few other aspects remain of his life after those.
His passion is reignited by Angela, his daughter's school friend; a girl half his age. This new vigor sets him on a new path in which he starts working out, smoking pot, quits his cushy job for one at a fast food joint, buys a flashy new car, and stops caring what everyone else thinks about him in general.
He observes in the beginning of the film that his wife is no longer happy. You can see this, not only in the way she interacts with Lester, but with her daughter and neighbors, and the way she prioritizes her job and possessions over relationships. She, like Lester, seems stuck in a societal hole that she feels trapped within. Her supposed salvation comes in the form of her work rival, with whom she has a passionate affair. She loves, she loses, she falls back into her hole. Her big moment in this film, in my opinion, came in the final scenes, where we make a very realistic discovery. Although the passion had gone out in their relationship, and although she was looking for love in other places, in the end, she still loved Lester in her way, which makes his death all the more tragic.
Then, we have Chris Cooper, who plays Colonel Fits. Fits spends the film in a state of aggression due to his repressed sexuality. Society has told him his whole life that what he feels in this regard is wrong, and so his guilt displays itself in his anger and disconnect with those to whom ought to be closest. Because his arc is never completed, his story ends violently as he sinks back into his repressed and 'acceptable' state. Cooper gives one of the best performances in the movie, second only to Spacey. You can actually feel the struggle raging inside him throughout the film, making his actions at the end terrible but heartbreaking at the same time.
Finally, Angela is the last compelling character in the film. Although I don't personally identify with all aspects of the character, she is the most relatable in terms of the three kids. She feels things the way normal people do. She wants to be special, seen, and desired. As she said in the film, the worst thing to be, in her eyes, is ordinary.
Jane and Ricky on the other hand, the demographic with whom I'm supposed to relate, are incredibly weak characters. Throughout the film, I found them pretentious and annoying. This is especially disheartening, because, as a whole, all the characters in this film are after the same thing: self-actualization and fulfillment. The reason I find this annoying is because the character who has supposedly achieved these goals is the most pretentious and emotionless character in the film... to the point where I'm almost suspicious that he may be a serial killer. I'm afraid that if the daughter does end up running off with him, that she may never be found again. Just putting that out there.
That being said, the rest of the film was captivating. The way the director told the story of emotional transformation through the color red was beautiful. I love the subtle but powerful details of this choice. The red door, the red car, how the characters wear red when pursuing their passion, blood splattered across the bleach white room. All in all, I can only recommend this film. Yes the subject matter and zeitgeist is a little dated now, but the emotional and psychological content is still pertinent almost 20 years later. 7/10