American Beauty

Released: September 17, 1999

Studio: DreamWorks

Genre: drama

Box Office (numbers in millions):

Domestic: 130.10 Worldwide: 356.30

Adjusted for Inflation:

Domestic: 216.70 Worldwide: 504.87

Directing: Sam Mendes

Screenwriting: Alan Ball

Starring: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper

Review:

American Beauty is the feature film debut of director Sam Mendes, a longtime English stage director, and playwright/screenwriter Alan Ball. It “is a biting black comedy on contemporary American life.” ^AFI07 “It’s about yearning after youth, respect, power and, of course, beauty.” ^RE

“The tragic, absurdist, dark domestic tale” ^FS focuses on “Lester Burnham (Spacey), who calmly narrates his own story posthumously a la Joe Gillis from Sunset Boulevard (1950).” ^FS He’s a “chronic loser…[an] American suburbanite family man who is unable to speak his mind or actually feel much of anything.” ^FS He’s endured “too many years of a demeaning job, and a dysfunctional marriage to his obsessive-compulsive, adulterous realtor wife Carolyn (Bening).” ^FS

Lester, however, turns “his midlife crisis into a midlife resolution.” ^EM’18 “He becomes infatuated with his self-loathing daughter Jane’s (Birch) under-aged cheerleader friend Angela Hayes (Suvari)” ^FS while his daughter “has fallen for the drug-peddling, video-voyeur neighbor next door Ricky Fitts (Bentley).” ^FS “Ricky’s dad (Cooper) is a former marine who tests him for drugs, taking a urine sample every six months.” ^RE

“Angela is not Lester’s highway to bliss, but she is at least a catalyst” ^RE for his release from his mundane life. Lester “does reckless and foolish things [but]…he knows he’s running wild – and chooses to, burning up the future years of an empty lifetime for a few flashes of freedom.” ^RE All the characters’ “emotional threads come together during one dark and stormy night, when there is a series of misunderstandings so bizarre they belong in a screwball comedy.” ^RE