Audience Rated by buyers R (Restricted)
Type of bind: Video On Demand
Release Date: October 01, 2008
Running Time: 122 minutes
Sale Popularity Level: 1786
Studio: Paramount
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Rated by buyers 
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This is a good film and and I would like it except for two things: The title and the fact there was nothing to feel good about in watching this film--it was depressing. It is a not-so-subtle attack on middle class American values and institutions. Targets are the American Military, Marriage, gun ownership, corporate America/capitalism, consumerism, traditional morals and sexual mores etc....The only thing the writers left out was religion--none of the cast of dysfunctional people were church going christians. I am sure this was a oversight. The title was off putting because it suggests that Americans have empty, dysfunctional, meaningless lives. This film is a left-wing diatribe with a social agenda to bash american society using many liberal cliches and unlikable, one-dimensional characters. Maybe I read too much into it.
The only semi normal, healthy people were the two gay neighbors; everyone else is a mess. Of course, the worst writing came with the new family subsequent door with the father being a Marine Colonel. He was portrayed as a domineering man incapable of expressing his feelings and love for his family. He imposed harsh discipline and physical abuse for even minor infractions. Of course he had a large gun collection and Nazi memorabilia. His disdain for his gay neighbors is on complete display and of course we find out that this disdain is only there to hide his own latent homosexuality. How tiresome! The realtor/wife of the main character builds confidence and feels "powerful" by learning to shoot a gun. The only semi-likable character is Kevin Spacey's who is a guy in a mid-life crises brought on by his own sexual frustration and infatuation with---the friend of his daughter. He quits his job, and tells off those corporate creeps. He grey mails them into a year's salary. We are supposed to feel okay about that because they deserve it. Then he pursues and seduces his daughters best friend. In the process he buys the car he wanted as a teenager, starts smoking pot again and listens to rock music. The only redemption for him comes at the end when he doesn't go through with the little affair he had been planning--but he comes awful close. The message of this film is: don't be uptight-express your feelings, smoke pot and have sex. Sounds a bit like turn on, tune in and drop out. A classic film for 60's rejects.
The artistry in this film comes in the way it is told on the screen. It moves along at a nice pace and keeps you off-balance and guessing. There are a few poetic scenes when the neighbor boy and son of the marine talks about his desire to film and his contemplation of beauty, which gives the film its title. I don't care to see it again.
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This is one of my favorite movies and it gets better each time you watch it. You can identify with some of the characters in the movie and although it is dark and sad, it has a moral to the story and the ending was just amazingly done. Even though your sad for the main character, you still realize that his life had finished in a weirdly positive way. Hence the smile at the end. I highly recommend this movie. It should be in everyone's DVD collection and is one of those movies you can watch over and over again without getting bored. And it is not entirely always dark. There is comedy woven into the movie as well. Again, one of the best Kevin Spacey movies ever.
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American Beauty reflects the beginnings of the "Impressionistic" stage of movie making. The scenes and characters are conglomerations of situations and "types" of people... The real estate agent, the bored commercial writer, the unhappy teenager, the uptight military officer, the Stepford wife, the abused son, etc. Each person plays his role according to his type.
The movie successfully reveals pent up emotions beautifully such as when the real estate agent ends her day of promoting a home she's selling by bursting into tears after the last visitor leaves. I'd never really thought about how painful it is to be upbeat about selling so-so real estate.
Yes, this movie has shortcomings, but it succeeds in its ability to reveal emotions without filling in every detail. Be reminded that on one hand the story is depressing, yet on the other it is uplifting because the harmed party did it his way.
Not a very first date type of flick. It is genuinely made for intense discussion.
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My mom had this dvd lying around the living room so I decided to watch it yesterday since I was bored with nothing else to do. I knew a little bit about it from watching the oscars back in 1999 and from word-of-mouth. It is a pretty good movie story wise, though a little predictable at times. All the characters can be relatable. Kevin Spacey delivers a dramatic and comendable performance and Anette Bening is great too. The acting in this movie was top notch. I would have give it 5 stars it if werent for the predictibility in this movie. Overall, I would reccomend it to casual movie fans like myself.
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Drama in which a middle-class suburban family begins to fall apart when husband and father Kevin Spacey starts going through a mid-life crisis, quitting his job as a magazine writer, befriending his teenage daughter Thora Birch's boyfriend Wes Bentley, starting to smoke marijuana and beginning an obsession with his daughter's best friend Mena Suvari, all in an endeavor to dispel the deadness that he feels inside and regain the happiness that he feels that he has not had since he was a young man. Spacey's behaviour serves to further destabilise his already dysfunctional family in which his daughter despises him and his wife Annette Bening and him never have sex: now his wife runs into the arms of another man and his daughter progresses from despising him to being outright sickened by him because of his obvious sexual interest in her best friend. But Spacey doesn't care because he feels that his life was a sham anyway and the only way he can regain what he has lost is by letting go of all the lies and pretences and doing whatever will make him and him alone happy. This film is populated by largely tragic characters, all struggling to make sense of life and escape the despair and bleakness that seems to them to be all that there is. Spacey is reliable as the voice of the movie and the main protagonist going through the mid-life crisis who moves from sympathetic to unsympathetic to sympathetic through the course of the movie. Thora Birch is excellent as Spacey's teenage daughter who feels that she is a misfit and forms a relationship with troubled boy subsequent door and drug dealer Wes Bentley, who has been inside a mental institution and has an unsettling habit of filming people on his camcorder when they don't know he is watching. Annette Bening is on form as Spacey's desperately unhappy estate agent wife whose primary concern is putting on a façade of marital and domestic bliss for the world to see to hide the fact that her family and marriage are falling apart. Mena Suvari puts in a favourable performance as Birch's insecure best friend who derives her self-esteem from the fact that men find her sexually attractive but is secretly afraid that she is nothing special and hence will never gain the adulation that she craves. Finally Chris Cooper is good in a supporting role as Birch's boyfriend Bentley's violent and homophobic father. This film, although largely bleak in tone and quite disturbing at times, is poignant and has a profound message about the importance of seeing beauty in life, which director Sam Mendes symbolises throughout the film with blue petals from the American Beauty rose (from which the film takes its name). With a number of revelations and a shocking final twist, this is one of the best films I have ever seen, and easily deserves the Oscars that it won. An outstanding accomplishment.
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