American Beauty (1999)
Black comedy of the deepest and richest darkness overlaid by constant intercutting of dreams that are forgotten in the action and become a normality; this dark, stylised films contains some genuine laughs, only to be overshadowed by winsing. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is having a mid-life crisis. He's about to be fired from his job as the company takes employee cuts; his teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch) holds him in a fierce grasp that only teenagers can acheive. Wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) has morphed into the quintistial housewife 90's style, work driven, OCD obsessed housewife with her perfectly moulded figure hides a volitile character. The Burnhams' friends and neighbors include Lesters rival Buddy King (Peter Gallagher), new kid next door Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), who deals drugs and films everything; Ricky's dad, a marine hardman (Chris Cooper); and the guppie Jims (Scott Bakula, Sam Robards). And, of course, Jane's young cheerleader friend Angela (Mena Suvari), representing Lesters want to get back to the days of careless partying, leading him to radically change his life to have her dote on him.
Lester's firsts words state that he will be dead before his next bithday, as a viewer you never doubt this and feel that the film will lead to this, therefore keeps you spellbound and i found myself glued to the edge of my seat. The film follows the downfall of Lester in his menacing, illegal and destructive time interweaving with his daughters journey with her new boyfriend and self obessed overpowering Dad who is hiding a deep secret and using his son as a scapegoat this leads up to the final scene where things go mad.
The screenwriter is not trying to pin the reason for this downfall on the prominance of guns and unhappy lifestyle that we live in but likening it to the life of a life of an American Beauty rose, brightly coloured, highly uniformed and scentless, mirroring the storyline. The stylised way the movie is filmed twinned with the amazing performances inparticularlly from Kevin Spacey in his depiction as the reborn self destrucive 40 somthing makes the film a must see.