Mar
4
Lester Burnham: [narrating] american beauty quotes I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time . Lester’s mid-life crisis causes him to drastically change his life around when he quits his job and works at a fast food restaurant. He starts working out to gain the attention of Angela, a friend of Jane’s who brags about her sexual exploits every weekend. Lester looks at an old photo of his family, and smiles. He is then suddenly shot in the head.
Lester is no rebel–Lester is Everyman in all His astonishing ugliness and frailty, and Spacey delivers this milquetoast Archie with a plaintive sensitivity. I love this performance. Lester’s death is meant as a american beauty quotes condemnation of the intolerant and repressive world he inhabits, a world that first drives a man to the breaking point and then punishes him for breaking. If american beauty quotes does have a moral, perhaps it is this: beauty on the one hand, and the values of bourgeois Judeo-Christian American society on the other, are mutually exclusive. Lester?s relationship with his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) is not a warm one; while on the surface Carolyn strives to present the image that she?s in full control of her life, inside she feels empty and desperate. Their teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is constantly depressed, lacking in self-esteem, and convinced that she?s unattractive.
Meanwhile, more dead bodies are discovered with their internal organs missing. Clues lead to Lazarus, a scientist with ties to a cult, and it is discovered that he has a gigantic . Meanwhile, Lester’s wife Carolyn takes up with the local real-estate King and daughter Jane runs off with the drug dealing odd-ball next door. Who in turn is doing his best to get away from his homophobic ex-military father. Meanwhile, Carolyn, listening to self-help tapes in her car, decides she refuses “to be a victim,” loads a gun and starts the car, apparently with the intention to kill Lester.
American beauty quotes comes with an aura of dazzlingly positive reviews — which, I presume, simply reflects the film critics? There is not much quality to be witnessed in this film: it?s not the worst I?ve seen this year, but it?s decidedly the most annoying movie I?ve seen all year. american beauty quotes denounces this that, under a guise of Puritanism, commits the irreproachable, like family fathers chasing after young girls. Sexual frustration touches several other characters. American Beauty is too smart and savvy for this sort of self-satisfied complacency. Lester’s new assertiveness and celebration of his own true nature has its good points–the scene where he triumphantly presents his condescending supervisor with his “job description” is one of great ’stick it to the Man’ moments in movie history (”My job requires mostly masking my contempt for the a——s in charge, and fantasizing about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.”) On the other hand, his new-found freedom and candor leads him to frighten his wife (who possibly deserves it) and his daughter (who doesn’t remotely deserve it) with violent outbursts and china-smashing tirades.