Thought Provoking Best Picture Winner. (Spoilers not intended.)

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2019)

Everyone talks about the film aspects that make American Beauty such a praised movie. Analysis videos mention how Red symbolizes love and lust or how the blood means the opposite. Roses mean lust and-simply-desire.
American Beauty, which won Best Picture for 1999, moves me in a different way. I am 20 years old now, and I first saw it when I was 17. I liked it when I first saw it, and that was about it. I thought of the plot later, realizing that the movie focuses on a 42 year old man in his mid-life crisis wanting to seduce his daughter's 17 year old friend.
I got rid of my old copy after that, but then a year later my Marketing teacher gave me a box of DVDs that his wife and him didn't want. American Beauty happened to be one of them. It's the copy I still own today, in fact.
This may sound like a terrible idea, but I wanted a 2nd opinion on the movie, so I asked my Grandma to see it with me.(I was 18 at this point). As I watched it again, and noticed this time that Lester(the 42 year old) tries to resist his temptation, and when he gets his chance, he stops himself. (That's how far I will go to avoid spoilers.)
I asked my Grandma about what she thought of the movie. She said it was okay. So then I asked "So...what did you think of the Dad and the teenager?" She responded with: "Well, sometimes that happens." From there she explained that it is not okay but we do live in a world where such things happen.
I responded with: Well, if I have a mid-life crisis, I'm not going to do that!" I found myself dwelling on that discussion often, and I thought about ways Lester could have dealt with his immoral desire. And that slowly made it one of my favorite movies.
Forget the Oscars and the film-making aspects, American Beauty truly is a beautiful movie due to it's message of sexual purity in a parable, for lack of a better term, of what happens if you are NOT sexually pure.
It may make you uncomfortable, but it should. It's wrong to chase after such desires, and seeing the downfall of such behaviors will in the end make you a better person from having learned from it.
The tagline for American Beauty is "Look closer." If you do that, you will find a fascinating and thought provoking look at sex and marriage. That's what makes it a great movie...to me.