Watching #AmericanBeauty because I'm on a bit of a Sam Mendes kick.

Some thoughts:

Lester is entirely responsible for his malaise yet the film kind of blames it on cubicles and suburbs and society rather than the lack of attention and concern he's paid to his relationships.

We're meant to delight in his disdain for his prescribed life and view him as honest for hating it and other characters as liars when... really...he's lying to himself, refusing to take responsibility for failing to nurture his marriage and relationship with his daughter.

Jane is great.

She speaks the truth - calls him out for wanting to both be her parent whom she worships AND "come to her first" to maintain the relationship...an impossible and selfish burden to place on a child.

She makes total sense to me.

Carolyn is played with absolute commitment by Benning (so props to her) but the character feels like a parody without the film knowing she's a parody.

We're supposed to sneer at her for caring about superficial things but sympathize with her pathology.

That feels incongruous.

e.g. she's "hateful" for matching gardening clogs to pruning shears.

This is only "evil" in a privileged mind who ignores her humanity. She likes things to match. Is that so bad? Or she's compensating for the lack of any meaningful connection with her emotionally absent spouse.

Then, when she can't "sell this house today" she cries and we watch her slap herself, eyes in perfect warm light as if to suggest "this is her truth" and we're supposed to feel...what exactly?

The framing and performance suggests "sympathy" (right after we're meant to sneer)...

The real world result, for me, is that it reads as a transparent grasp at "character depth" rather than an honest examination (or revelation) of this woman's pain. It reads as insincere - like we're playing with the trope of suburban repression rather than the reality of it.

Next we get Lester's first fantasy and subsequent coming on to Angela in the parking lot.

Perhaps it's only thanks to hindsight, but the movie unsuccessfully straddles the line (a line it's clearly aware of) between exploring tabu sexual fantasies and making a creep sympathetic.

It pairs odd and, therefore, resonant erotic imagery with the narrator's plight to subtly justify (by way of the medium's inherent visual power) his creepiness and immaturity.

i.e. the pretty pictures and funny dialogue tricks you into liking him when, really, he's an asshole.

He's not an asshole because of his tabu sexual fantasies (he's human, after all)...he's an asshole because he's lying to everyone in his life, including himself, and he's actively pursuing a minor, which is illegal, for good reason.

He is selfishness masquerading as heroism.

Meanwhile Carolyn remains on the periphery of this marriage/scene, ignoring the reality of her husband pursuing a teenager right in front of her.

In this parking lot, I'm finally finding her sympathetic and real. She's desperate to ignore it all in service of stability.

Now we've transitioned into Ricky Fitts' home (very smooth, albeit also creepy, transition by way of a camcorder). This rings true. A sense of vague, immense tension btwn father, mother, and son.

Fear at the sound of a doorbell.

That feels specific and honest.

Ricky Fitts in the car with his homophobic dad is excellent - not unlike Jane calling Lester out for his lies and ignorance.

The teens in this movie make all the sense.

The adults are the problems, which feels weirdly pertinent at the moment.

Alrighty - going to bed now. May not finish this thread.

All in all, I see what's good about this movie technically. I get why people love it.

But it has some seriously flawed ideas of what's actually wrong with people on the micro and macro level, and that's true even in '99.