Review: Kat Cole

American Beauty (1999)

Director: Sam Mendes

“I’m 42 years old; in less than a year, I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. And in a way, I’m dead already.”

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is having a midlife crisis. Fed up with his uptight wife, ungrateful daughter, unfulfilling job and after meeting (and taking quite a shining to) Angela (Mena Suvari) - a friend of his daughter Jane, he finally decides it is time to stop adhering to what society expects of him; goodbye crappy job, hello pot.  Goodbye sexless marriage, hello fresh, teenage meat.  Goodbye Toyota Camry, hello 1970 Firebird. Goodbye, constraints, hello liberation.

Meanwhile, Jane falls for Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) a mysterious loner and drug dealer who spends his time documenting all that which he considers beautiful with his video camera.

Whilst reading for my dissertation, I came across a book called The Rebel Sell (2005, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter) in which American Beauty is discussed in relation to a countercultural analysis and the repression of the Freudian concept of id (or, the inner child). This interesting critique is what sparked my interest in watching this film for the first time.

American Beauty is aesthetically stunning. The use of the colour red within the film (rose petals, lipstick and blood for example) to me represented moments in which the ego/super ego of a character was unable to control the innermost, childlike desires of their id. Choosing not to heed these red warnings and then attaining these ‘red’ desires ultimately lead to Lester’s red, bloody demise.

The conflict between the anal but socially adhering characters and the pot smoking rebels in American Beauty does little to challenge countercultural ideology (primarily, that you must buckle down and conform in order to get on in life) and “the question therefore becomes not whether one of [the other characters] will kill Lester, but rather which one of them will do it” (Heath and Potter, 2005, page 56). 

Interestingly, I felt that the story of American Beauty actually centered on the character of Ricky Fitts and not Lester Burnham like it may at first appear. That Fitts experiences life via the captures of his video camera symbolises that he views the world differently to the other characters and connotes further the driving point of the film, to “…look closer” (the film’s tagline) in order to see beauty in the places you never thought that you would.

One of my initial reactions to American Beauty was that it could (and perhaps should?) have been edited to be shorter than its 122 minute long running time, as there were parts where it felt as if very little was happening. Drama is a genre of film that I have had very little previous engagement with. As a genre where the focus is on the development of characters, it would be interesting to see if I would appreciate these slower paced moments more (in relation to my understanding of each of the characters) after a second viewing of the film.