Everything about American Beauty Film totally explained
American Beauty is a 1999
drama film set in modern
American suburbia. Starring
Kevin Spacey and
Annette Bening, it was the feature film debut for
writer Alan Ball and
director Sam Mendes. All four were nominated for
Academy Awards, and the film won a total of five including
Best Picture.
Plot
The movie opens with scratchy
camcorder footage of a teen girl reclining on a bed. She complains about her father, who she says is boring, socially awkward, and a general embarrassment. A young man off-camera, presumably the operator of the camcorder, asks in a somewhat offhand way, "You want me to kill him for you?" She thinks for a moment and then says with a smirk, "Yeah. Would you?"
The movie begins again with Lester Burnham (Spacey), a 42-year-old father and advertising executive. Lester begins a self-narration, although Lester as the audience sees him on screen isn't actually talking. He says to the audience, "In less than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet. And in a way I'm dead already." It soon becomes clear why: His family life is messy. His wife Carolyn (Bening) is an ambitious, pretentious realtor with little on her mind but success: "My company sells an image. It's part of my job to live that image." His 16-year-old daughter Jane (Birch), who was seen earlier in the camcorder footage at the beginning of the movie, is considering breast implants. "Janie's a pretty typical teenager," Lester says, "Angry, insecure, confused. I wish I could tell her that's all going to pass, but I don't want to lie to her." Jane and Lester haven't spoken to each other for months. Lester himself is a self-described loser: boring, faceless and easy to forget. "I
have lost something. ... But you know what? It's never too late to get it back."
The daily lives of Lester, his wife, and his daughter are demonstrated by showing how each of these three characters proceeds through a typical day. Lester begins his day with
masturbating in the shower; he describes this event as the highlight of his day. Later Lester is shown at work, where his boss asks him to write a job description; Lester's boss is trying to identify which workers are expendable so that they can be fired in order to save
money for the company. Carolyn attempts to sell a house to various couples while meeting rejection after rejection. After an unsuccessful day, Carolyn repeatedly slaps and scolds herself and then begins to cry before going home for the evening. Jane spends her days outside school with a superficial best friend, Angela Hayes (Suvari), with feelings of insecurity. At the dinner table the somber mood is apparent with the dull music chosen by Carolyn, strained communications, Jane's moodiness, Lester's failed attempts to discuss the events at his workplace, and Carolyn's dominance.
Lester's inspiration for transforming himself from a loser to a winner is Angela, Jane's best friend and classmate. Angela is a beautiful and confident girl who feels that "[t]here's nothing worse in life than being ordinary," and she hopes to become a
model. Lester meets her when he and his wife Carolyn go to a
basketball game to watch their daughter
cheerlead. Lester immediately develops an obvious infatuation with Angela, and Jane feels
embarrassed as a result. That night, Jane notices an unknown person who is outside her window and who is videotaping her with a camcorder, but Jane is actually flattered by this act. Later, when Jane has Angela stay for a sleepover, Lester overhears Angela say that she'd "totally fuck him" if he worked out; as a result, Lester immediately rushes to his garage and begins to lift some old weights that were lying around in the garage.
The next morning we're introduced to the family that has just bought the vacant house next door to the Burnham family: Col. Frank Fitts,
USMC (Cooper), his wife Barbara (Janney), and his son Ricky (Bentley). When confronted by the openly gay couple two houses over (Jim Olmeyer and Jim Berkley, Bakula and Robards respectively), Fitts shows a distinctly bigoted attitude. Barbara spends entire days silently zoned out, and Ricky is making far more money than a high-schooler should. Ricky is revealed to be the person with the camcorder, and when he gets to school he approaches Jane and Angela with almost eerie confidence. "I'm not obsessing," he says to Jane (more or less ignorning Angela), "I'm just curious."
Meanwhile, at a party for realtors, Carolyn, reluctantly accompanied by Lester, finds herself being swept away by charismatic and highly successful rival realtor Buddy Kane (Gallagher). Lester meets Ricky, whose work as a caterer is a mask for his successful career as a
marijuana dealer. Lester becomes one of his clients.
All these plotlines come to a head on one climactic day:
- Carolyn meets Buddy for lunch and ends up having loud sex with him in a motel;
- Lester quits his job, blackmails his boss for a full year's salary (including full benefits) as a severance package, and takes up employment as a burger-flipper at a fast food chain; and
- Jane and Ricky bond over his father's war paraphernalia, and then one of his camcorder movies of what he considers his most beautiful footage, that of a plastic grocery bag dancing in the wind. "Sometimes," he explains, "there's so much beauty in the world."
Over dinner that evening Lester stands up to his wife for the first time, and begins to break her deadlock control over the house. In this scene he apathetically informs Janie of what he's done today: "Today Janie, I quit my job. Then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus." When Carolyn's tearful apology to Jane turns into a fight, Jane opens the curtains of her window to see Ricky in his room with his camcorder. In a moment of deliberate vulnerability, she reveals her breasts to him, but the moment is shattered when Col. Fitts smashes into Ricky's room and beats him for going into his office, thinking Ricky was looking for drug money. When Ricky says he was bringing his girlfriend in, though, Fitts relents, and the day closes with Ricky dabbing at his face in the mirror, the camcorder (hooked up directly to the television) showing a sideways room.
Lester continues to liberate himself from failure. He trades in his Toyota Camry for a 1970 Pontiac Firebird ("The car I've always wanted, and now I've it. I rule!"), and continues to work out and smoke marijuana. He describes his philosophy to Carolyn: "This isn't life, it's just stuff. And it's become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that's just nuts." Carolyn is having none of it. She, for her part, is visiting a firing range on a regular basis: Buddy's idea, and a truly empowering thing for Carolyn; just before coming face-to-face with the Firebird she's singing and grooving in her car, clearly happier than she's been in ages. Finally, Ricky and Jane commune in his bedroom, a confessional that leads to the video camera footage seen at the beginning of the film. Unfortunately, Ricky turns off the camera before she can remind him that she was just joking.
The next scene opens with Lester's narration: "Remember those posters that said, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life?' Well, that's true of every day except one: the day you die." Jane invites Angela over for a sleepover, but not before confronting Lester about his embarrassing behavior. Ricky rides to school with Jane and her mother, and Lester gestures, "Call me"—which Col. Fitts catches; confused, he roots through his son's possessions, but instead of finding the marijuana or the video of Jane's "confession," he finds one of Lester working out naked ("Welcome to America's Weirdest Home Videos," Ricky narrates). Buddy and Carolyn, midway through a tryst, happen to stop at a Mr. Smiley's, where Lester pre-empts the drive-through worker for a pleasant conversation with his wife; afterwards, Buddy decides that maybe they should let things cool down (though Lester seems blase about it). Carolyn has now lost everything and has a breakdown, screaming her despair as thunder crackles overhead.
Lester's out of something too: weed. He pages Ricky, who hurries over with a refill; they pause to smoke together, while Col. Fitts watches. Due to some deceptive perspective work, however, it looks to him like Ricky and Lester are doing something else, especially when they break it up in a panic when Jane and Angela arrive. Lester turns on the charm for Angela, but is confused when she backs down nervously. Ricky, returning home, finds his father waiting for him with fists and vitriol—"I won't sit back and watch my only son become a cocksucker!!"—and threatens to throw him out of the house. This is exactly what Ricky wants, and he pretends to "come out of the closet" to escape. Then he rushes back to Jane's house, and the two make plans to leave for New York City. When Angela tells Jane not to, Ricky shoots her down with the claim that she's ugly and ordinary, and that she knows it. Angela storms out of the bedroom and breaks into sobs on the stairs.
Lester, working out in the garage, sees a man standing outside in the pouring rain. It's Col. Fitts, soaked and broken. Lester attempts to comfort him, but is taken totally by surprise when Fitts kisses him: "Whoa. I'm sorry. You got the wrong idea." Fitts, shamed as well as broken, wanders back out into the rain. Meanwhile, Carolyn, alone in her car in the rain, listens to a self-help tape urging her to take responsibility for her problems and their solutions. She grabs her gun from her glove department and begins repeating the words spoken on the tape.
Finally, Lester finds Angela playing the stereo, trying to reassemble her life. She is reassured when he tells her he doesn't think she's ordinary at all, but the seduction derails when she confesses that it's her first time. Lester can't do it. He makes her a sandwich and they bond over the kitchen counter, talking about Jane ("She thinks she's in love," Angela scoffs). She asks him how he's feeling, the "first time someone has asked [him] that in a long time," and he realizes, to his surprise, that he feels great. Angela goes to the bathroom, leaving him alone to contemplate a picture of his smiling family... Unaware of the gun poking into the shot behind him, Lester contemplates the changes he's made in his life, and reflects this only through his last words (with a smile): "Man oh man. Man oh man oh man."
The movie ends with Lester's description of his life flashing before his eyes, interspersed with scenes of his family and others at the moment of the gunshot: Jane and Ricky, steeling themselves for their journey; Angela, bustling in the bathroom; Carolyn, a rain-drenched avenging angel descending on the front door. Col. Fitts, in his office, strips off his latex gloves and bloody T-shirt; behind him, one of the guns is missing from his rack. Carolyn throws her purse and its firearm into a hamper in the closet, and collapses, sobbing, into a pile of Lester's shirts. But Lester himself, looking back on these events from his vantage point as narrator, is content:
Cast
Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham
Annette Bening as Carolyn Burnham
Thora Birch as Jane Burnham
Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts
Mena Suvari as Angela Hayes
Chris Cooper as Colonel Frank Fitts
Peter Gallagher as Buddy Kane
Allison Janney as Barbara Fitts
Production
Alan Ball originally wrote American Beauty for the stage. He saw a paper bag floating in the wind near the World Trade Center plaza and was inspired by it to write the film.
Many of the school scenes were shot at South High School in Torrance, California, and most of the extras in the gym crowd were South High students. Sam Mendes designed the two girls' appearances to change over the course of the film, with Thora Birch gradually using less makeup and Mena Suvari gradually using more, to emphasize their shifting perceptions of themselves.
Singer and dancer Paula Abdul choreographed the cheerleading scene.
During the movie's second dinner scene, Spacey was only supposed to throw the plate of asparagus onto the floor. However, while shooting, Spacey improvised and pitched it at the wall, bringing about genuine (rather than acted) reactions of shock to Bening and Birch's faces.
Deleted plotlines
According to Chris Cooper, much of Col. Fitts' backstory was eliminated from the final script, in which Fitts is a closeted homosexual who lost his father during the Vietnam War.
Alan Ball's original screenplay had opening and ending scenes in which Col. Fitts frames Jane and Ricky for the murder of Lester. They go to jail, but Col. Fitts' wife finds his bloody shirt and sends it to the authorities. After shooting these scenes, Sam Mendes removed many of them for the first cut, feeling that they made the film lose its mystery.
Although Ball and Mendes initially disagreed, Ball accepted the new version after Mendes made further cuts to that part of the plot, which "worked on the page but not really on screen."
In the DVD commentary, Mendes refers to deleted scenes for the viewer to find on the disc. However, these scenes are not on the DVD as he'd changed his mind after recording the commentary.
Soundtrack and score
The score to American Beauty was composed by Thomas Newman. The soundtrack features songs by artists such as The Who, Free, Eels, The Folk Implosion, Gomez, and Bob Dylan, as well as a cover version of The Beatles "Because" performed by Elliott Smith. The film also features "Don't Let It Bring You Down" performed by Annie Lennox, though this wasn't included on the soundtrack.
The Original Motion Picture Score was later released on January 11, 2000. This contains 19 tracks composed by Thomas Newman for the film.
The score was sampled in the 2000 dance track "American Dream" by Jakatta.
Reception
Three months before the film's opening, New York Times reviewer Bernard Weinraub described it as "the most talked about film of the moment." His column, which ran on the weekend of July 4, gave few specifics regarding the film but noted that it was generating "tremendous buzz" in the DreamWorks studio, as the details of how and when the movie would be released were debated; it also reported that Steven Spielberg (a co-founder of DreamWorks) called the film one of the best he'd seen in years and that Bening was moved to tears at an early screening.
The movie premiered on September 8, 1999, in Los Angeles, California, to reviews that generally reaffirmed the advance hype, uniformly praising the cast, script, and cinematography, as well as the first-time direction by Mendes. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Guthman called it "a dazzling tale of loneliness, desire and the hollowness of conformity." Jay Carr for the Boston Globe called the film "a millennial classic"; the New York Post called it "a flat-out masterpiece." Among the smaller number of critics who expressed negative opinions of the film were J. Hoberman of the Village Voice and Wesley Morris of the San Francisco Examiner, both of whom were critical of the film's script and direction, if not its performances.
On September 11, it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People's Choice award just days before its opening. Aided tremendously by the positive press, the film took in $861,531 on its opening weekend in the United States, despite a limited release to only 16 screens. By October, the film was released to a wider audience, and quickly surpassed the film's estimated $15,000,000 production budget. Ultimately, the film would gross $356,296,601 internationally. Awards
The movie dominated the 2000 Oscars, with a total of eight nominations and five wins. It also had another 82 wins and 63 nominations at numerous other award ceremonies.
Wins
Academy Award for Best Picture (Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks)
Academy Award for Best Actor (Kevin Spacey)
Academy Award for Directing (Sam Mendes)
Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay (Alan Ball)
Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Conrad L. Hall)
American Comedy Awards, USA: American Comedy Award for Funniest Actress in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)
American Society of Cinematographers, USA: ASC Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases
Australian Film Institute: Best Foreign Film Award
BAFTA for Best Film (Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks)
BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Kevin Spacey)
BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Annette Bening)
BAFTA Award for Best Editing (Tariq Anwar), (Christopher Greenbury)
BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography (Conrad Hall)
BAFTA Award for Best Music (Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music) (Thomas Newman)
BMI Film & TV Awards: BMI Film Music Award
Bodil Awards: Bodil for Best American Film (Bedste amerikanske film)
Bogey Awards, Germany: Bogey Award
British Society of Cinematographers: Best Cinematography Award
Directors Guild of America: Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (Sam Mendes)
Grammy Award: Best Score Soundtrack Album (Thomas Newman)
Chicago Film Critics' Assoc.: Best Picture (Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks)
National Board of Review: Best Picture(External Link
)
National Board of Review: Breakthrough Performance-Male(External Link)
Screen Actors Guild Award: Best Actor (Kevin Spacey)
Screen Actors Guild Award: Best Actress (Annette Bening)
Screen Actors Guild Award: Best Ensemble (Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper, Allison Janney, Peter Gallagher)
Nominations
Academy Award for Best Actress (Annette Bening)
Academy Award for Original Music Score (Thomas Newman)
Academy Award for Film Editing (Tariq Anwar)
American Cinema Editors, USA: Eddie for Best Edited Feature Film - Dramatic
American Comedy Awards, USA: American Comedy Award for Funniest Motion Picture, Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)
Art Directors Guild: Excellence in Production Design Award for Feature Film
Awards of the Japanese Academy: Award of the Japanese Academy for Best Foreign Film
BAFTA Award for Best Direction (David Lean Award for Direction) (Sam Mendes)
BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay - Original (Alan Ball)
BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Wes Bentley)
BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Thora Birch)
BAFTA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Mena Suvari)
BAFTA Award for Best Sound
BAFTA Award for Best Production Design
BAFTA Award for Best Make Up/Hair
Blockbuster Entertainment Awards: Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Actress - Drama, Favorite Supporting Actor- Drama, Favorite Supporting Actress - Drama, Favorite Actor - Drama, Favorite Actress - Newcomer (Internet Only)
BRIT Awards: Brit for Best Soundtrack
Chicago Film Critics Association Awards: CFCA Award for Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Actress
Cinema Audio Society, USA: C.A.S. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for a Feature FilmFurther Information
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