ABSTRACT
American Beauty
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is of him naked in the shower, masturbating. “This,” he informs us in a confessional, self-mocking voiceover, “will be the high point of my day. It’s all downhill from here.”
At first sight, it would seem Lester (played by Kevin Spacey) has a perfectly respectable and satisfying American life. Forty-two years old, employed as a writer for an advertising industry magazine, living in a comfortable house in a clean and quiet suburb, married to a beautiful woman, father to a healthy teenage daughter — he appears to have achieved admirably the basic goals for which most people in our society strive, right down to the home-cooked family dinners served at the dining room table each night. But all is not well with Lester. He admits that he feels unsure of himself, detached from his surroundings, sedated: “I’ve lost something, but I don’t know what.” The first several scenes of the film, with their artful mix of comic absurdity and spiritual despair, make it clear that the pleasing appearance of normality in Lester’s life is only a disguise for the gnawing sadness and aching desperation that are consuming both him and his family. His wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), is a real estate agent whose maniacal determination to “project an image of success at all times” requires the strictest possible control of emotion, behavior, and appearance. His daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), despises both her parents, and, while she feigns a cool disinterest in how she looks, she in fact worries about the shape of her breasts and is secretly saving money for an implant operation. Carolyn and Jane make no secret of the contempt they feel for Lester and the clumsy, vacant way he sleepwalks through life. Lester has a dim awareness of the distance that has grown between them — “We used to be happy,” he muses — but he does not know when this happened, or why, or what if anything he can do about it.
