This is important. I'm Ricky Fitts. I just moved into the house next to you Hey, do you party? Lester's surprised, but instantly intrigued. Ricky and Lester stand next to a dumpster behind the service entrance to the hotel, smoking a JOINT ss thematic issue-senses. Ricky hides the joint. I'm not paying you to. Don't pay me. I quit oc driver-change. Now, leave me alone.
I think you just became my personal hero ss concern-understanding. Doesn't that make you nervous, just quitting your job like that? I just do these gigs every now and then as a cover. But my dad oc domain-mind interferes a lot less in my life when I pretend os benchmark-being to be an upstanding young citizen with a respectable job os problem-perception.
Like all the objective characters in American Beauty, Ricky has his own agenda os domain-psychology. Taking Jane in with an ardent video gaze-he is captivated:. Voyeurism and exhibitionism loop, as through the camera lens Ricky seeks out Jane from his bedroom window:. Jane tries to shut the drapes, but Angela won't let her. Irritated, Jane retreats into the room. The lives of these characters, many of them familiar to viewers, gain in intensity as various threads cross to produce an unresolvable knot.
Before the dramatic ending, Lester sits at the table with a picture of his "ideal" family taken some years ago when, in fact, they looked as perfect as American Beauty roses. He loved his wife and child, had noble aspirations, and expected a different kind of life. In spite of stacked circumstances, many moments in the funny and frightening story are uncomfortably familiar.
I assigned American Beauty to first-year medical students. And when we learn that he's the father of the girl from the home movie, we ask ourselves again: what kind of movie is this? Some kind of horror movie? We thought we were watching American Beauty , not American Patricide.
Turns out, it's not really a sinister story that's overly focused on murder although, sure, Lester does get smoked eventually or murder plots.
Really, it's all about how Lester "wakes up" emotionally and physically from a life that had become pretty stagnant. From the outside, he and his wife have pretty much been living the American dream.
They have a beautiful house, a pretty daughter, Jane Thora Birch , and decent jobs. We quickly learn that Lester feels trapped and feeble in that life, though. He hates his job, and he and Carolyn are indifferent to each other on their best days and openly hostile on their worst. Oh, and he's got a little pent up sexual energy as well. Things shift for Lester when he starts ogling his daughter's friend Angela Mena Suvari at a high school cheer performance. Naturally, Jane finds Lester's obvious interest in her friend completely disgusting and wrong which it is , but it does help Lester wake up a bit, in terms of his emotions.
He suddenly realizes that he doesn't have to be miserable, passive, and sexless, and he starts working out, standing up to his boss, and pursuing a—er—active fantasy life.
The performances all walk the line between parody and simple realism; Thora Birch and Wes Bentley are the most grounded, talking in the tense, flat voices of kids who can't wait to escape their homes. Bening's character, a real estate agent who chants self-help mantras, confuses happiness with success--bad enough if you're successful, depressing if you're not.
And Spacey, an actor who embodies intelligence in his eyes and voice, is the right choice for Lester Burnham. He does reckless and foolish things in this movie, but he doesn't deceive himself; he knows he's running wild--and chooses to, burning up the future years of an empty lifetime for a few flashes of freedom. He may have lost everything by the end of the film, but he's no longer a loser. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
Mena Suvari as Angela Hayes. Chris Cooper as Colonel Fitts. Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham. Annette Bening as Carolyn Burnham. Thora Birch as Jane Burnham. Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts. Reviews American Beauty.
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