There is cinema. And then there is cinema. Life mirrored through the lens of a camera, mirrored through the lens of a camera - like a self referential spiral that collapses into itself.
American Beauty directed by Sam Mendes, is the story of a prurient man undressing a clothed beauty, only to discover that he has instead unraveled a burgeoning beauty of a subtler, a more pervasive kind that fulfills as it satiates. Lester Burnham(Kevin Spacey) is a middle aged man whose life is an insipid void that fills his entire existence. Disillusioned with his marriage, his career and the metaphysical objective of his life, Lester anthropomorphizes the apathy that infests all our souls. His wife Carol(Annette Bening) a struggling real estate agent, is a desperate, conflicted woman whose life is wrought with her obsessive compulsions for success and conformity.
Their marriage, riddled with their personal angst and mutual frustration slowly dismantles into shreds of estranged and bitter loneliness. Lester who starts out to reclaim his joie de vivre through psychedelic rock, drugs, bench press and lust for his sixteen yr old daughter’s girlfriend, sees his world slowly transform into a wonderful haven that houses the most simple beauty, hitherto unbeknownst to him. Ricky Fitts(Wes Bentley), Burnham’s neighbor is an intense and earnest eighteen year old boy who freezes the aesthetic fragments of our fleeting world into his videocamera. They together form the seam whose threads come loose as each character stumbles into and climbs out, of his frailties, insecurities and hidden longings.
American beauty makes no heroes out of its characters, for existence seldom makes heroes out of its real life characters.Part tragic, part comic, at times surreal, the film talks to you through its dank rainy night scenes, its haunting musical score and the lives of its all-too-real characters. It is an optimistic but sad, beautiful but depressing, disjointed but ultimately cohesive movie that pieces together the motley emotions of our detached entities. It teaches you to not only look, but to look closer. To see.
An erstwhile friend once remarked that movie reviewers spurned out names of the production crew and technicalities, but seldom ’’lived’’ a movie. There was a chasm he said, between ’analysis’ and ’realization’. This movie is a point in case. My case. Indeed words make emotions claustrophobic. But to write about a movie is to experience it - ’posthumously’. You rewind after you eject, only that you do it this time around in your mind.
Watch it. It might change your life.