American Beauty

A film set in the American suburbs. Lester is forty-two and opens as narrator by saying he will be dead within a year. Nobody in the house talks to anybody. His wife sells property and has fixed on success; his daughter hates them both. Lester quits his job. He starts work at a burger place, lifts weights, smokes, and sells his wife's car to buy the one he wanted when he was young. At the same time he develops an obsession with his daughter's friend, and the film does not romanticise it. Next door there is a retired military officer. Violence in the house, a rigid order, and something being hidden. From there the film looks into several houses at once and finds the same thing in all of them: nobody is who they appear to be. What the narrative is interested in is not unhappiness but looking: its best known scene is a video recording of a plastic bag in the wind, used to say that beauty sits in ordinary places. The tone moves between comedy and tragedy and the ending gathers that into one sentence. The cinematography by Conrad Hall is the strongest thing in it; symmetry, red and glass surfaces are used as a system throughout. The script was first written as a stage play. The film won five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Screenplay and Cinematography. Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari, Wes Bentley and Chris Cooper are in the cast. Sam Mendes directed; he came from the theatre and this was his first film. Who it is for: anyone interested in the late 1990s American critique of suburbia. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot carry the lead's obsession now; the film builds distance from it, but that may not be enough for everyone.