How can you define a movie that defines you ?

Rating: 10/10 (30 June 2011)

"American Beauty" is a challenging film to review. So challenging I hesitate between two radical attitudes, introspective and philosophical or cynical and detached, but I guess neither would work. One would be like Lester's infamous "highlight of the day", the other like Lester unbuttoning Angela's blouse with appetite before she reveals it's her first time. In both cases, it's excitement leading to disappointment.
So, what's "American Beauty" exactly telling us?
In fact, I don't even think the movie tells 'us' something, but rather tells something different 'for each of us' ... for some people, it's like an "Existentialism For Dummies" film, for others, it's an inspirational invitation to "play an active role" in life rather than "enduring it". The figure of Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham, the average looking tertiary employee man, incarnates the pervert effects of suburban life, mostly made of superficiality and illusions of happiness through the sensations of owning stuff, or being someone on the basis that you wears a tie, carry a briefcase and have a job, no matter how useless for the future of humanity, it is.
But Lester incarnates this figure with the quality that makes losers so appealing: lucidity. He knows his life is crap. He knows his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) and his tormented 17-year old daughter Jane (Thora Birch) see him as a loser. And he knows his life has reached rock-bottom, but it's never too late to change. Paraphrasing another existential film of the same year, we meet Lester "at a very strange time in his life", where in a crucial Howard 'Bealesque' impulse, he decides he can't take it anymore.
And the pivotal point couldn't have been creepier. Lester gets infatuated with his daughter's friend, the cute and apparently slutty Angela, and decides to do some muscular exercises, to impress her and ultimately to  sort of  bang her. Well, the beautiful Conrad L. Hall's cinematography depicts Lester's lusty fantasies in such stylish aesthetics you totally forget that it's all about assessing his manhood on a creature so young, she would see the man, not the exploited office worker, the passive husband, or the lousy father. Angela, the delicate and sensual Mena Suvari shows the light to Lester, a road paved with so many rose petals that paint Lester's dreams in a shining red almost foreseeing the film's bloody epilogue. Anyway, from this lust at first sight moment, Lester is another man, abandoning himself to solitary pleasures not in the shower anymore, but in bed with Carolyn, who starts to realize that if she's not the mother of the year, she's not the wife either.
Carolyn is a flamboyant real estate agent who loves her job, as much as her little rose garden. She takes care of both with the same perfectionist delicacy and same dreams of accomplishment. She's so blinded by her ambition that she's incapable to realize the failure of her marriage and lives more confidently in the apparent illusion of comfort and success, than the real substantial essence of happiness. But Carolyn is only superficial if you look at her with superficial eyes. Look closer, since this is the movie's tag-line, Carolyn is not ambitious, she's not superficial, she's just naive for God's sake. She's the perfect embodiment of the constant optimistic attitude illustrated by Voltaire's character Candide whose motto -ironically- happened to be : "We need to cultivate our garden".
And for the disillusioned Jane, the idea of self-improvement can only be reduced to a project of breasts augmentation surgery. Her teenage crisis is aggravated by the absence of strong models. She hates her pervert father, her dull mother, her life.
The changes occurring in the Burnham Family will coincide with the arrival of the new neighbors, the Fits, another peculiar and not-so-happy family. The father Frank, Chris Cooper, is a bigot minded homophobic ex-military officer, with a totally lobotomized wife and one unique son, Wes Bentley as the tortured Ricky. Ricky is literally, the 'eye' of the film, as the one who films people with a cam and develops a strange ability to see inner beauty whether it's in Jane, dead birds or plastic bags, yes he's weird. "Me Ricky, You Jane". He's not just an eye-opener, he's eye-opening, catalyzing Lester's evolution, leading to one of the most inspiring 'I quit' scenes from a man who's got 'nothing to lose'.
But in a pessimistic device, paraphrasing another existential film of the same year, self-improvement ends up looking like masturbation and for Lester, the death it lead to, wasn't the "little" one. He'll end up killed by Frank Fits after the unfortunate misunderstanding built up all through the film. Ebert said something like: "Lester Burnham is dead but he's not a loser anymore." I disagree with this positivist attitude. Death is still the ultimate loss and I'd rather not be a loser, only if I had the chance to be something else.
So for realistic people, "American Beauty" is a pessimistic pamphlet against the American Way of Life. For pessimistic people, it's a depressing introspection into the alienating effect of the bourgeois way of life, for depressed people, it's the unbearable crappyness of life ... so crappy that you rather find beauty in a vulgar plastic bag floating in the wind ...
Or maybe "everything is not what it seems to be", and American Beauty is just a manipulative film trying to convey the dangerous idea that the best way to be freed from social obligations is to do sports, smoke pot, and live like a parasite, or it's simply the best film of the 90's.
In other words, either "American Beauty" is a masterpiece because it's so misunderstood, or it's such a masterpiece that it's misunderstood.
That's what I call the 'Fight Club' syndrome.