"It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world -and you just have to remember to relax and not try to hold onto it. And then it passes through me, like rain.".
American Beauty is a startling and sensitive film with the rare ability to reach out to people, touch them, and open their eyes. Director Sam Mendes has created a complex tale of human emotion, repression, destruction and rebirth, all linked together by one theme. The theme of beauty runs throughout the film, like a rose petal floating, falling and weaving through the lives of the multi-faceted characters we meet; hungrily looking for every perverse detail of their fragile lives, every flash of red, every cruel thorn, and every wilting innocent, as we watch them through rose-tinted glasses. American Beauty is just that, a film about beauty - the beauty of freedom, the beauty of change, and the beauty of realising that even the greyest life, can be permeated by roses.
During one of the opening scenes of American Beauty, "horny geek-boy" Lester Burnham says of his perfectly detailed and structured wife, "See how her clogs match the colour of her garden clippers? That wasn't an accident." And like the manicured Caroline, American Beauty is also perfectly detailed and structured, and few of the details are accidental. The ongoing motif of the colour red is used to express beauty, the roses that fill Lester's dreary life represent structured perfection and contrasting freedom, and brief references to nudity, show the characters' journeys as they strip away their bitter disciplined lives, to the freedom and happiness that lurks beneath the layers.
Mendes' American Beauty narrates a year in the life of Lester Burnham, a masturbating, droopy-mouthed, flabby 40-something with no happiness in the present or the future, and his past buried in paperwork and "thousand dollar sofas". Accompanied by his adulterous and neurotic wife Caroline, his tormented teenage daughter Jane, Jane's enigmatic boyfriend Ricky, the bitchy cheerleader Angela and the sexually repressed Mr Fitz, Lester undertakes a journey, changes his life, finds true beauty, and dies.
