The movie opens on a teenage girl being filmed by her boyfriend. She says she hates her father and that someone ought to put him out of his misery. He is a "horny geek boy". Her boyfriend asks her if she would like him to kill her father and she says yes. Title screen. Following is a shot of a perfect neighborhood in Anywhere, U.S.A. where all of the houses look the same and garbage cans are never allowed to stay out on the street. The voice of Lester Burnham is heard saying that in one year's time he will be dead, and the audience understands that beneath the veneer of this holiday card the people that fill these houses are dead and decaying.
Lester is a sad man with a wife and daughter who look at him with disgust when they acknowledge him at all. Lester is at a point in which his job is on the line, he hasn't consummated his marriage in a very long time, has no friends, and even though he has all of the material pleasures he could want--he has the perfectly realized life of the lower upper-class American--he feels dissatisfied.
But attending a high school basketball game to watch his daughter, Jane, perform her cheer routine, he spots Angela, Jane's 16 year old slutty best friend, and Lester is enraptured--more, he becomes obsessed. Seeing the blonde vixen he has found his reason for living, and live he does. Lester quits his job (in a very cunning way), starts working out with his gay neighbors, and takes up smoking pot with the kid next door. The less he tries to be perfect and the less he tries to care, the happier he becomes even though he and his family end up paying the ultimate price for his actions.
This is one of the angriest, most acidic pieces of modern, mainstream cinema to come out of Hollywood in decades, and it is nearly perfect. The writing is so precise and so funny, that it is far too late before the audience realizes that they are watching a heartbreaking story of a fully grown man with no vision and no purpose for being except to seduce an illegal girl. Intellectually we understand this--he makes his motives very clear--but at a gut level it isn't felt until too far in because we have been spending so long laughing at the brilliant satire of the script. In the end, however, we are laughing at miserable people who go along with their day to day lives, pruning roses and laughing at unfunny jokes, simply because they are conditioned to. This film hates the falseness in which people lead their lives simply because they believe that that is being happy. Lester is black cavity on an otherwise perfectly white tooth.
All of the other characters have their secrets too. Lester's money-grubbing, real estate wife, Carolyn, is cheating on him with the Real Estate King. His daughter has been saving up babysitting money so she can afford a boob job. Ricky Fitts, the strange observer from next door and Jane's boyfriend, runs a very successful little business selling pot to locksmiths, pediatricians, and to Lester, of course. Ricky's Marine Corp father owns Nazi paraphernalia, and has a further, more disturbing secret which I will not name.
At first I was not happy with the fact that this neighborhood and these people were painted with such a high gloss. It seems that anytime a filmmaker wants to make the point that their story could be the tale of any person in America, it becomes necessary that they sell real estate or insurance, live in a big white house, and drive an SUV. But upon further reflection it seems to me that on a scale of 1-10 most of those films make that caricature a 7, while this film probably pushed it up to an 8. The purpose of that being American Beauty needed to very forcefully illustrate what people think "America" and their lives ought to be, in order to spend the time showing what they aren't.
It is clear that Ricky Fitts is the eye of the writer. He is imperfect, but he recognizes his flaws and is unbothered by them. He films what he finds beautiful: a dead bird, a homeless women who froze to death, Jane's lopsided breasts, and most notably a plastic bag floating with the breeze. He is mentally unstable, but there is an honesty in his eyes, and love in his heart, and he is quick to realize that Angela's beauty, of which Lester is so overwhelmed, is only skin deep, and that she is as unhappy as everyone else.
This movie works because everything that is done or said or shot is realized with such intensity. The casting director has to be given a lot of credit for perfectly chosen actors. Kevin Spacey is Lester, doing less "Kevin Spacey" and far more "Lester" than he has done in most of his films. Annette Bening (one of the most undervalued working actresses) is Carolyn. Thora Birch is Jane, whose naivety is swallowed up by the force of Ricky Fitts, played by Wes Bentley who did a terrific job, though I don't know any of his other work.
All of the other parts, from the direction to the writing to the amazing cinematography, all come together to create a work of big budget art, and one of the high points of 1990's cinema.
4/4
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