The 79th Academy Awards ceremony, the film that caused a huge reaction in the United States was “American Beauty” directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey and Anita Bening. The low-budget film earned high box office revenues during its release in the U.S. and won ten Academy Award nominations, winning five awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
American Beauty” is the directorial debut of Sam Mendes. It tells the story of a middle-class suburban family’s moral collapse. Lester is the standard middle-class, middle-aged, boring life, his wife Caroline is a real estate agent, indifferent and ambitious. His daughter, Jenny, is a cheerleader, precocious and confused. Lester is in love with his daughter in order to pursue Jenny’s classmate, the sexy Angela. The encounter with Angela awakens a latent energy in Lester that has been buried for many years. He begins to split up, as if he were 19 years old, constantly pursuing Angela, and not hesitating to train bodybuilding, take drugs, and quit his job to work in a restaurant like a high school student.
However, his wife was also having an affair with another man and was caught by Lester. At the same time, his daughter is also planning to run away with others. Lester’s neighbor, Colonel Fitz, misunderstands Lester’s relationship with his son Ricky. Colonel Fitz is a repressed homosexual who mistakenly believes that Lester is paying Ricky for sexual services. One rainy night, the colonel can no longer resist temptation and finds Lester in the garage, asking him for sex. Lester is surprised and refuses the colonel. Soon after, the colonel returned with a gun and shot Lester through the head. As he dies, Lester finally revisits the most beautiful moments of his life and finally understands what he has been looking for.
In the film, the director adopts a realistic approach and points a subjective perspective to the daily lives of the characters. The film comfortably presents scenes of everyday life, thus further exploring the depths of each character. The emotions and entanglements presented in the story are extremely realistic, full of absurdity and dark humor, and it needs to be chewed on and dug deeper bit by bit before the true humanity behind the characters is revealed. It is easy to see that “American Beauty” is a microcosm of the modern American family, and at the same time it is like a metaphor for the spiritual life of Americans. The director has fully demonstrated the spiritual crisis faced by Americans through the anatomy and examination of the mid-life crisis and other aspects.
Compared with previous Hollywood films, the form of the film “American Beauty” has changed dramatically. It is free of idealism and heroism, lightens the storyline, and portrays ordinary Americans in a very realistic, simple and natural way. At the same time, the film uses subjective shots, psychological montage and metaphorical symbolism to express the flow of the characters’ consciousness and their desire for good things, and the detailed presentation of their hidden inner worlds brings the audience great shock and profound reflection.
At the same time, the traditional structure of cinematography is also used to the greatest extent in this film. It can be seen that the general framework of the film’s events is the classic three-act structure, which not only carries the film’s own broad and profound social significance, but also balances the appeal of the plot development itself. The whole film is like a beautiful elegy, exploring a series of interesting ideas within this classic framework of the director, creating a unique aesthetic effect.
Throughout the movie “American Beauty”, the film not only creates a complex and diverse image of the male protagonist. The plot is also arranged in such a way as to showcase many brightly colored, intoxicating and moving emotional scenes. This movie not only has a strong visual impact, but also has beautiful photography and composition that satisfies the enjoyment of the viewer’s senses. The director skillfully portrays common but extraordinary life stories, such as mid-life crisis, marital disputes and extramarital affairs, in order to dissect and dig into society and human nature. It can be said that the rich and diverse ideological and artistic values it presents, as well as its profound reflections, make it an important film work that peeps into contemporary American society.