American Beauty

“Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world…” how to complete this sentence? Ricky (Wes Bentley) says: “…I feel like I can’t take it.” Some other could say: “… it kills me.”, and some other, let’s say Alan Ball could say or had already said that we’re killing each other with our desire and obsession for beauty. There were many striking questions I was left to answer, first of all ask myself, after watching American Beauty.

What is beauty? In general, beauty is what is desirable, attractive and unfortunately more generally, sexy. In different aspects it may present innocence, pureness and childhood, yet from a different perspective it is nature, the spirit and life as a whole. In Sam Mendes’s movie, all different understandings of beauty are represented in the very core of family ties with the help of a very old technique of showing the distorted one to point out the natural form. If there is no beauty than there is no ugliness, if there are no norms to fit in than there is no dissatisfaction. To a more general extent, beauty is all around us, and what keep us from reaching it are the limitations that we surround ourselves with.

This theoretical concept of beauty may seem fugacious from the beginning to the end, but it actualizes itself in many relationships like the suppressed father and the girl trying to get recognition. In the movie, Lester (Kevin Spacey) is in some kind of a mid-life crisis and his desires are represented by the very common elements of beauty, a blonde young girl with all her nudity and the leaves of red roses, this is almost a cliché, on the other hand in Jane (Thora Birch) and Ricky’s relationship nudity is replaced by the nudity of the souls, blondness is now turned into very big and meaningful brown eyes, the red rose is a bag flying in the air. Right at this point, I should add that the scene with the bag is the most spectacular and fascinating scene in this movie, which is capable of expressing the whole idea very simply and without any words. If I go back to relations, there is even beauty in the relationship of colonel Frank (Chris Cooper) and Ricky, a very sad and sick way of love, but all of that love felt for each other has grown into an unhealthy situation with the lack of communication to point out the distortion in the American way of having a family. The most emphasized critique of the movie was made on the family values, but I think there is more to that, the film captures all the realities of individuals in their depth.

The film has a narrative storytelling in which Lester take us to the last days of his life. The positioning of the audience as an inspector is obtained with the camera capturing the town from the sky, and coming closer to Lester’s house, where we are welcomed. The neighborhood is a very typical American suburb where we see a little sample of social realities of American life, two gays living next door, the family life of a soldier and a family which seems perfectly normal at first sight and than we get into the story of these lives. The story itself is amazing enough but Sam Mendes had used a powerful visualization of some scenes to increase its effect, like the repetition of some shots to give the feeling of dreamlike desires of Lester and he also used beauty by means of reflections in a photographic manner as in the scenes where Lester and Ricky smoke joint in the backyard of the restaurant and the scene when Lester lies dead in his blood. There is also that irony of the camera use by Ricky to capture beauty especially in the scene, which we see him filming Jane through his window and we see her simultaneously on his screen, which is transmitted to us from Mendes’s camera.

American Beauty is one of my favorites when I consider the script, dramaturgy, and cinematography. All the players perform a very successful acting especially Kevin Spacey as he always does. Wes Bentley and Chris Cooper are also very good in fitting those characters. I believe that the script has a plenty of messages to be delivered and it brilliantly succeeds in its mission through the cine eye.