Sam Mendes’s directorial debut 1999 with American Beauty made him an instant success; the black dramedy starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Mena Suvari, Thora Birch, Peter Gallagher, and Chris Cooper was an instant hit. The movie won five Academy Awards: Best Actor for Kevin Spacey, Best Director for Sam Mendes, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography.
The movie tells the story of a man, his life, work, family, and relationships in an every day, everywhere town in the United States; it’s Sam Mendes’ slap in the face to the perfect American Suburbia, a place that’s perfect and trouble-free, but has troubles like every other segment of the society, even the ones they try to segregate and disaggregate from.
So, how does this movie conclude, and what is its message? Well, that is what I will try to share with you. The Sam Mendes masterpiece has been the subject of scholarly research and articles, not only from its cinematographic perspective but also from the societal critiques it covers with such crude detail.
American Beauty: Sam Mendes’ Slap In The Face To Suburbia
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a middle-aged man living in a beautiful suburb that could be in any part of the United States: White picket fences, white houses of prefabricated fashion, a red door, a bed of roses, no crime, drifters, and everything is pretty and overwhelmingly white.
But Lester hates his job, his life, and his marriage. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is a neurotic, borderline obsessive-compulsive disorderly bitch of a wife who also cheats on him with a coworker from a real estate brokerage firm. Lester and Carolyn have a teenage girl, Jane (Thora Birch), who detests her mom, dad, and herself.
Lester’s Surroundings
Lester’s new neighbors are a US Marine Corps retired colonel named Frank, an ultraconservative, strict, rigid, and closeted homosexual man who has a wife who seems to be in some catatonic, pharmacologically induced trance (maybe the woman is on OxyContin, but the movie doesn’t say). Their teenage son, Ricky, a dude with a knack for recording home movies, and also a very successful pot dealer whose problems with weed have made his dad take him a few times to the loony bin and a military academy to straighten him up.
Since this movie’s suburbia is overwhelmingly white, the 1999 diversity quota limited itself to a gay couple that jogs in hot pants and kisses each other before work. Something that Frank detests but secretly admires as he’s a closeted fairy himself, as we will see.
Lester Sets His Eyes On Angela
Lester has boring work and a boring life; one day, he goes to her daughter’s cheerleading routine during a high school basketball game and sets his eyes on a teenage girl who’s friends with his daughter, Angela, played by Mena Suvari.
Lester immediately starts to fantasize about her in the most depraved ways, but beautifully put into the scene with shots of Mena Suvari covered in rose petals and a bathtub, exhibiting her beautiful, slender white skin, perfect flat abdomen, and cute smile.
Lester Is Laid Off
One day, Lester is fired from his wage cage job. Still, he blackmails his boss into giving him a very sweet severance package. To keep the profits, save face, and not look like a loser to his daughter and wife, he works at a drive-thru burger joint, flipping burgers, making fries, and taking orders. He doesn’t say to Carolyn or Jane he’s been laid off. Instead, he puts the appearance that he’s moving up the corporate ladder.
Buys himself a nice car and begins to work out in the garage pumping iron after he overhears that Angela tells Jane that she finds Lester attractive and would have sex with him if he had nice biceps and a six-pack abdomen. Well… What better motivation for a bored man than the promise of sex with someone else when he’s fed up with what he has at home? And since he’s bored AF, he starts buying weed from Ricky.
Plot Thickens
And if things didn’t get any messier, Ricky begins dating Jane, who shows her how much of a closeted homosexual his dad is and how he can afford those fancy cameras he makes home movies with Selling weed.
One day, Lester is flipping burgers and discovers that Carolyn is cheating on him with a coworker when he overhears a conversation in the drive-thru intercom. He surprises Carolyn by giving them the order they asked for, and he feels satisfied and plenty and tells her that she no longer tells him what to do anything.
Seeing the chaos, the coworker dumps Carolyn, and she’s angered at the fact that she got busted and feels humiliated. Annette Bening does wonders at acting as a sexually frustrated and humiliated housewife who wrecked her marriage in several scenes. Meanwhile, a frustrated Carolyn takes a gun from her car’s glove box and seems like she’s going somewhere with it. But no.
We then jump to a scene where Angela and Jane are arguing over Ricky, who, after goading his dad and having a big wad of cash, could start things somewhere by running away and asking Jane to join her. Still, Angela considers that wrong, and Ricky calls out Angela’s superficial beauty as a character flaw.
Frank Steps In
Frank starts to notice that Ricky and Lester spend more and more time together alone; he doesn’t know he’s dealing him weed. Instead, he suspects that the two are having sex together. He accuses his son of being a male prostitute, but Ricky tricks him into thinking he “is the best piece of ass in the whole town.”
Frank breaks down, and his closeted homosexuality flourishes when he moves on Lester, who’s iron-pumping, has him with bulging biceps, and tries to kiss him, but Lester tells him he’s got the wrong idea. Frank breaks down and leaves.
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Lester and Angela
After Lester shrugs off, Frank’s closeted homosexuality passes at him, and he finds Angela sitting in his living room; she’s alone after fighting with Ricky and Jane.
He talks to her and tells her she’s pretty, courts her, and eventually, Lester tells Angela that he has the hots for her. After Lester and Angela pick up the signs that sex is on the table, Lester undresses Angela. She admits she’s a virgin, and he’s shocked and taken aback that Angela’s apparent sexual expertise talk with her daughter was just a cover for her innocence to make her look cooler than her peers. Lester loses the initiative, and they talk.
American Beauty Ending Explained
After Lester comforts Angela, she goes into the bathroom and sees the family portrait of Lester, Carolyn, and Jane; in a beautiful edition and cut smash scene, an unseen figure puts a revolver behind Lester’s head and blows his brains out.
Ricky and Jane run down the stairs to see what happened and find him lying in a pool of blood. Then, in yet another beautiful camera work, Carolyn cries in a maniacal and hysterical rage as she hugs Lester’s clothes and removes the revolver.
Then, we see Frank taking off their surgical gloves, with blood all over him, and returning home with a gun missing from his collection. Frank killed Lester because he thought Lester would out him as the repressed fairy he is. Carolyn wanted to hurt Lester but was too neurotic to do so.
So, in the end, Lester got redemption, both from his death and because all through the film, he was lusting for an underage girl, but he balked at it when he had the chance and died, knowing that he did a good thing.
That’s the beauty in American Beauty: It is a disheartening tale that beautifully showcases the shallowness, lack of clarity, and blatant corruption displayed by a portion of US society that futilely attempts to deceive not only themselves but also others due to their reluctance to reveal their true nature.
