American Beauty

American Beauty is one of those films in which almost all the characters are arseholes. The film begins with the spoilt brat Jane going on a rant about how pathetic her father (Lester) is; it's not until the film ends that you realise the significance of this part. The mother (Carolyn) is a failing real-estate agent. Lester is at risk of redundancy in his unsatisfying job at a magazine. These two begin as normal, nice-enough, middle-class, White Americans. They have drifted apart in their marriage slowly so that now they cannot stand each other. They live in a huge house. They do their best for their daughter, but she hates them and rebels by deliberately looking unattractive.

Jane's best friend (Angela) is a flirtatious girl, who is afraid of being considered "ordinary" and feels excited when other men fancy her. She has better social skills than Jane, but is manipulative underneath the smiles.

Lester & Co get some new neighbours. Frank Fritts is an ex-marine with Nazi sympathies (wouldn't have been much use in WWII) and the son (Ricky) has been brutalised by his parenting methods. Ricky sells cannabis and earns a large amount of money, which Frank thinks he earns from working in catering. Frank begins to film Jane on her way home from school. In one of those plot twists that are dangerously unrealistic, Jane falls in love with Frank later on. I wonder if anyone decided to imitate Ricky's methods to win the heart of a girl.

The plot unravels well in the first two-thirds, with a series of events leading to character changes. Lester becomes sick of how unfilfilling his life is. He starts to talk back to Carolyn, having been passive for many years, and starts to wank in bed whilst lying next to her. When asked to write a statement of his worth to the magazine, Lester gives a sarcastic return to prompt being sacked, although he wins a decent payoff after blackmailing them with the release of embarrassing information. He starts to fancy Angela, and exercises so that he can look better in front of her. His fantasy scenes are very funny. After meeting Ricky at a pretentious dinner party, Lester begins to buy cannabis from him.

Carolyn is not developed in as much depth. She has an affair with one of Lester's business rivals after meeting him at the dinner party, and makes efforts to re-connect with Jane when the family is falling apart, but is unsuccessful. She feels as if everything is falling apart around her, and finally loses it when even her affair is unsuccessful.

The film ends with a narrative from Lester about how much beauty there is the world and how it's "hard to stay mad". This seems strange when you consider how mad all the characters have been for the last 100 minutes, so it took me a while to interpret this. Here is my view. Lester, Carolyn and Jane are well-off yet are thoroughly miserable. None of them seems to have a single health relationship or cause to work towards. In contrast, Jane had fallen for Ricky, who never lets anything get him down and takes pleasure from capturing simple images in life, such as a bag flying around. The message may be that people expect to find happiness from chasing material things when in fact that's just likely to lead us to a meaningless job and a dysfunctional family. The beauty in life is free, but many of us ignore it for the sake of material possessions. I would back this interpretation up with the (very good) scene in which Lester and Carolyn seem about to reconcile before Carolyn warns against Lester's spoiling the settee, which leads him to go on a rant about how it's just a fucking settee.

I'll give this four stars, but I think that it is overrated by others. It is not the 39th best film ever, as IMDb claims at present. The last third of the film becomes cumbersome. I can't discuss this part much, as it would give away the ending, but I found the end to leave a lot hanging, and the threads with Frank Fritts and Angela end in anti-climax. Apparently there was a different ending in the original script, which sounds a lot better to me. A good film can leave a few things up in the air, but this one goes too far. In addition, I mark it down because Jane seems to fall for Ricky out of the blue, and I doubt that any moody spoilt girl would fall for a drug-dealing peeping tom so quickly. The humour in the film is very uneven; some parts are very silly and other parts are about as funny as cancer.