Penetrating Drama Tells It Like It is

by Jason R. Hewlett

Have you ever woken up one day and realized that you've spent the last several years of your life stuck in a rut? Your marriage is a lie. Your job stinks. You've been putting on the facade of being a happy little human when you're really miserable. You've become a flabby, depressed, sorry excuse for a person and you have no conceivable way out. That's the premise behind director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball's witty, disturbing, and exceptionally brilliant motion picture "American Beauty."

The film covers the lives and events that change when bored, depressed Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) tires of the way his life is and decides to become happy. He quits his job to work in fast food, falls in love with his daughters best friend, gets exercise tips from a gay couple down the street, buys a vintage sports car he's always wanted, and begins buying pot from his neighbor's kid. Naturally everyone around him is greatly effected by Lester's change in lifestyle.

That's the plot in a nutshell. Way more goes on in "American Beauty" both above and below the surface. It's not always an easy film to sit through because it's brutally honest about suburban life in the 90s. Life is not the sweet, cookie-cutter joy we're always lead to believe it should be. Positive affirmation tapes are not the answer to all your problems. A marriage isn't always going to work out and you are not always going to connect with your children. These are not necessarily the easiest things to hear about life.

The film is not all doom and gloom. The humor is the best black comedy I've seen in a long time and several sequences are sidesplitting funny in their honesty. Lester does find his happiness and he does so by living life the way he wants to and maybe there is a lesson in that. Just because we are told to act our age and live our lives a certain way doesn't mean we have to. "Their is nothing worse than being normal" a character says in "American Beauty." Amen to that!

This is the first movie I've seen this year that is a true contender for Best Picture. I think I'll be hard pressed to find a movie that will affect me or entertain me more than "American Beauty" (with the possible exception of David Fincher's upcoming "Fight Club"). Between "Three Kings," "The Matrix," "The Blair Witch Project" and this film it's been a darn good year at the movies!

10 out of 10!