American Beauty is a 1999 American drama film directed by Sam Mendes and written by Alan Ball. Kevin Spacey stars as Lester Burnham, a 42-year-old advertising executive who has a midlife crisis when he becomes infatuated with his teenage daughter's best friend, Angela (Mena Suvari). Annette Bening co-stars as Lester's materialistic wife, Carolyn, and Thora Birch plays their insecure daughter, Jane. Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper, and Allison Janney also feature. The film is described by academics as a satire of American middle-class notions of beauty and personal satisfaction; analysis has focused on the film's explorations of romantic and paternal love, sexuality, beauty, materialism, self-liberation, and redemption.
American Beauty | |
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Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Sam Mendes |
Produced by |
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Written by | Alan Ball |
Starring |
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Music by | Thomas Newman |
Cinematography | Conrad L. Hall |
Edited by |
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Production company | Jinks/Cohen Company |
Distributed by | DreamWorks Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 122 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $15 million |
Box office | $356.3 million |
Ball began writing American Beauty as a play in the early 1990s, partly inspired by the media circus around the Amy Fisher trial in 1992. He shelved the play after realizing the story would not work on stage. After several years as a television screenwriter, Ball revived the idea in 1997 when attempting to break into the film industry. The rewritten script had a cynical outlook that was influenced by Ball's frustrating tenures writing for several sitcoms. Producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen took American Beauty to the fledgling DreamWorks studio, which bought the script for $250,000, outbidding several other production bodies. DreamWorks financed the $15 million production and served as its North American distributor. American Beauty marked theater director Mendes' film debut; courted after his successful productions of the musicals Oliver! and Cabaret, Mendes was only given the job after 20 others were considered and several A-list directors turned down the opportunity.
Spacey was Mendes' first choice for the role of Lester, though DreamWorks urged him to consider better-known actors; similarly, the studio suggested several actors for the role of Carolyn until Mendes offered the part to Bening without DreamWorks' knowledge. Principal photography took place between December 1998 and February 1999 on soundstages at the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California, and on location in Los Angeles. Mendes' dominant style was deliberate and composed; he made extensive use of static shots and slow pans and zooms to generate tension. Cinematographer Conrad Hall complemented Mendes' style with peaceful shot compositions to contrast with the turbulent on-screen events. During editing, Mendes made several changes that gave the film a less cynical tone than the script.
Released in North America on September 17, 1999, American Beauty was positively received by critics and grossed over $356 million worldwide. Reviewers praised most aspects of the production, with particular emphasis on Mendes, Spacey, and Ball; criticism focused on the familiarity of the characters and setting. DreamWorks launched a major campaign to increase the film's chances of Academy Award success; at the 72nd Academy Awards the following year, the film won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Spacey), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. It was nominated for and won many other awards and honors, mainly for the direction, writing, and acting.
Screenplay
Actor | Role | |
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Kevin Spacey | Lester Burnham | |
Annette Bening | Carolyn Burnham | |
Thora Birch | Jane Burnham | |
Wes Bentley | Ricky Fitts | |
Mena Suvari | Angela Hayes | |
Peter Gallagher | Buddy Kane | |
Allison Janney | Barbara Fitts | |
Chris Cooper | Col. Frank Fitts | |
Barry Del Sherman | Brad Dupree |
Lester Burnham is a middle-aged magazine executive who despises his job. His wife, Carolyn, is an ambitious real estate broker; their sixteen-year-old daughter, Jane, abhors her parents and has low self-esteem. The Burnhams' new neighbors are retired United States Marine Corps Colonel Frank Fitts and his near-catatonic wife, Barbara. The Fitts' teenage son, Ricky, obsessively films his surroundings with a camcorder, collecting hundreds of recordings on video tapes in his bedroom, and uses his part-time job of a social events waiter as a front for his secret marijuana dealings. Frank is a strict disciplinarian who previously forced Ricky into a military academy and briefly committed him to a psychiatric hospital. Jim Olmeyer and Jim Berkley, a gay couple who live nearby, welcome the family to the neighborhood; Col. Fitts later reveals his homophobia when angrily discussing the incident with Ricky.
Lester becomes infatuated with Jane's vain cheerleader friend, Angela Hayes, after seeing her perform a half-time dance routine at a high school basketball game. He starts having sexual fantasies about Angela, in which red rose petals are a recurring motif. Carolyn begins an affair with a married business rival, Buddy Kane. Lester is told he is being laid off, but instead blackmails his boss, Brad, for one year's salary plus benefits. He continues his liberation by taking up employment at a fast-food outlet, purchasing his dream car and doing physical workout after he overhears Angela telling Jane that she would find him sexually attractive if he improved his physique. He begins smoking marijuana supplied by Ricky, and flirts with Angela whenever she visits Jane. The girls' friendship wanes after Jane starts a relationship with Ricky; they bond over what Ricky considers the most beautiful imagery he has ever filmed: a plastic bag being blown in the wind.
Lester discovers Carolyn's infidelity, but reacts indifferently. Buddy ends the affair, fearing an expensive divorce. Frank becomes suspicious of Lester and Ricky's friendship and later finds his son's footage of a nude Lester lifting weights, which Ricky captured by chance. After watching Ricky and Lester through Lester's garage window, Frank mistakenly concludes they are sexually involved. He later beats Ricky and accuses him of being gay. Fed up with his father's authoritarian lifestyle, Ricky goads Frank to expel him from their home by falsely admitting to the charges. Carolyn is shown sitting in her car, where she takes a handgun from the glove box. Ricky finds Jane in the midst of an argument with Angela and convinces her to flee with him to New York City, before admonishing Angela as being boring and ordinary.
Frank confronts Lester and attempts to kiss him, but Lester rebuffs Frank, who flees. Lester finds a distraught Angela sitting alone in the dark. She asks him to tell her she is beautiful; he does, and the pair kiss. However, moments before they are about to have sex, Angela admits her virginity and Lester decides not to go through with the act. Instead, they talk, and bond over their shared frustrations. Angela goes to the bathroom and Lester smiles at a family photograph in his kitchen before being shot by an unseen intruder. Ricky and Jane find Lester's body, while Carolyn is seen crying in the closet. A bloodied Frank returns home, where a gun is missing from his collection. Lester's closing narration describes meaningful experiences during his life; he says that, despite his death, he is happy because there is so much beauty in the world.
Multiple interpretations
Scholars and academics have offered many possible readings of American Beauty; film critics are similarly divided, not so much about the quality of the film, as their interpretations of it. Described by many as about "the meaning of life" or "the hollow existence of the American suburbs", the film has defied categorization by even the filmmakers. Mendes is indecisive, saying the script seemed to be about something different each time he read it: "a mystery story, a kaleidoscopic journey through American suburbia, a series of love stories; it was about imprisonment, loneliness, beauty. It was funny; it was angry, sad." The literary critic and author Wayne C. Booth concludes that the film resists any one interpretation: " cannot be adequately summarized as 'here is a satire on what's wrong with American life'; that plays down the celebration of beauty. It is more tempting to summarize it as 'a portrait of the beauty underlying American miseries and misdeeds', but that plays down the scenes of cruelty and horror, and Ball's disgust with our mores. It cannot be summarized with either Lester or Ricky's philosophical statements about what life is or how one should live." He argues that the problem of interpreting the film is tied with that of finding its center—a controlling voice who " all of the choices". He contends that in American Beauty's case, it is neither Mendes nor Ball. Mendes considers the voice to be Ball's, but even while the writer was "strongly influential" on set, he often had to accept deviations from his vision, particularly ones that transformed the cynical tone of his script into something more optimistic. With "innumerable voices intruding on the original author's," Booth says, those who interpret American Beauty "have forgotten to probe for the elusive center". According to Booth, the film's true controller is the creative energy "that hundreds of people put into its production, agreeing and disagreeing, inserting and cutting".
Imprisonment and redemption
Mendes called American Beauty a rite of passage film about imprisonment and escape from imprisonment. The monotony of Lester's existence is established through his gray, nondescript workplace and characterless clothing. In these scenes, he is often framed as if trapped, "reiterating rituals that hardly please him". He masturbates in the confines of his shower; the shower stall evokes a jail cell and the shot is the first of many where Lester is confined behind bars or within frames, such as when he is reflected behind columns of numbers on
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