A cinema professor once told me that all movies came in genre form. He taught his classes that there are only ten plots that all films, from the beginning of the cinema to current releases, follow. There are no new stories and no new plots. These film formulas are the staples of American cinema.  To this professor I would say today: watch American Beauty.

American Beauty, staring Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey, was nominated for seven Oscars, winning five of them,  including best actor (Kevin Spacey), best original screenplay (by Alan Ball), best director, Sam Mendes, best cinematography (by Conrad L. Hall), and, of course, best picture. 

American Beauty follows the mid-life crisis/awakening of Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey). Lester's wife is frigid and career driven, his teenage daughter thinks he's a geek, and his young-corporate-America boss wants him to beg for his uninspiring cubicle-bound job - your typical white suburban male. Lester lives on a nice street, lined with nice trees, in a nice house, neighbored on one side by a perfectly charming and friendly gay couple (played by Scott Bakula and Sam Robards), and on the other by retired Colonel, his shadow of a wife, and their just-a-little-too-smart-for-his-own-good son. Everything about Lester's life seems like the dysfunctionaly average norm. Until we look closer.

The stereotypical caricatures of the people in Lester's life slowly begin to dissolve into three dimensional human beings as the story progresses. The first of these insights is when Lester becomes obsessed with his daughter's cheerleader girlfriend, Angela (played by Mena Suvari). He fantasizes about the sixteen year old doing a strip tease style cheer for him, culminating in a shower of rose petals floating around Lester's transfixed face. The feelings that the teen awakens in Lester spark an overhaul of his current feeling-less life. Lester begins to re-examine his career, his lifestyle, and his relationships with the people around him, often making changes in the most violent and disruptive - but to the viewing audience , most entertaining, - way.

As Lester goes through his transformation into the opposite extreme of the subservient husband and father, we gain closer insight into the minds of his wife, Carolyn (played by Annette Bening), and daughter, Jane (played by Thora Birch). If Lester has been the apathetic partner in the marriage, Carolyn has been the one with passion...a passion for success. Carolyn gives the viewer the image of one who has stopped living for the sake of living but for the reward of "being successful", arranging their home and lives (even down to the smallest detail of the music they listen to during dinner) to fit her ideal of a Successful Family. Everything in Carolyn's life revolves around the idea and image of success, even driving her so far as to have an affair with the most successful man she knows, Buddy the Real Estate King (played by Peter Gallagher). From her motivational tapes and mantras to her perfectly manicured conversations with the neighbor, Carolyn is determined to be a success in life, even if she has to stop living it.

It is not hard to imagine the effect of such parent on  young Jane - she hates them. She doesn't understand why she has to have such geeky parents (taking on the commonly naive viewpoint that the rest of the teen population doesn't) and rebels into a mood of self-deprecation and the general teen paradox of longing to be normal, but not just average. Jane clings to the coolest person she knows  as her only link to beauty her everyday realm of reality. The person who idealizes beauty to Jane is the cheerleader Angela. It is interesting to see the contrast between the beauty that Jane sees in Angela (as a worldly teen-model, with an adult-like nonchalantness towards sex) versus the beauty her father sees (as a well sculpted fantasy girl). Perhaps the filmmaker is trying to communicate that beauty is in how you see things and not necessarily what is seen.

As the story continues, the cast of eccentrically normal characters expands to include the Fitts family, the next door neighbors of the Burnhams. Col. Fitts (played by Chris Cooper) is a retired marine, who in our first glimpse of him with the gay couple from two doors down, makes it clear that he is of the oldest school of hard-core homophobic, heavy handed marines. His reaction to the gay couple, as expressed to his son, Ricky (played by Wes Bently), also gives us insight into Ricky's make-up, as he carefully manipulates his father into being proud of his son for hating the gay element in their neighborhood, giving the viewer the impression that Ricky has had a great deal of practice reciting just what the Col. needs to hear. We can see the effects of years of life with the Colonel in his wife, Barbara (played by Allison Janney),  who is best described as a shadow of a woman. The most impressive thing about her presance is the feeling she gives the viewer of not being there at all. The entire family revolves around how to deal with the Colonel - extreme withdrawal from him, or careful manipulation to appease him.

OFFICIAL Products from American Beauty from from DreamWorks & Amazon.com. American Beauty (1999) Other Formats: VHS subtitled in Spanish, DVD Cast: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening Director: Sam Mendes American Beauty Soundtracks Thomas Newman's Oscar- and Grammy-nominated soundtrack is available, plus the song score CD featuring a grand mix of cutting-edge contemporary artists and classic '60s rockers. Cast and Filmmaker Interviews  What could be better than acting? Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey dishes. Discover why Sam Mendes believes some of the best American movies are made by British directors, in our interview. American Beauty: The Shooting Script Check out the haunting script from breakout screenwriter Alan Ball.

One continuing theme throughout this movie is, appropriately enough, beauty. Each character (with perhaps the exception of Ricky) has lost  - or, in the case of the younger generation of the film, has yet to find - the ability to see beauty. Everyday life, ambition, and societal expectations have clouded the lives of inherently passionate people so far that they no longer can remember what it is that they , or the people around them, is living for. When one of this group, Lester, begins to see the beauty in really living life, the people around him feel a kind of threat to their comfortable, if rehearsed, way of life. The only way to maintain their contrived existence is to extinguish the traitor among them, meaning certain death for Lester,  as we are told so much in Lester's narrative.

As each character seems to be driven further and further to a breaking point, Lester remains calm and serene through the turmoil of his family and neighbors exploding around him. Lester has regained the ability to see the beauty in the odds they face. 

The strongest symbol of beauty in this film (though there are definitely many) are the red roses. In the beginning of the film we see Carolyn, as Lester describes her as joyless, meticulously cutting red roses from her garden. The roses are neatly cropped and evenly cut, each one a carefully controlled copy of the other - a sign of beauty manipulated to an ideal of perfection. Later in the film, as Lester begins to fantasize about Angela, we see the red rose petals exploding around them both - beauty unkempt and raw. Perhaps the filmmaker is posing to us the question: which is the truest form of beauty?  

This is an extremely well written story (and I can say that backed by the full confidence of the motion picture academy's vote) and beautifully portrayed by all involved - with , in this critic's mind, only one flaw. As the theme of the roses representing beauty is so strongly set up throughout the film, I would have liked to have seen it carried out to a resolution in the end. Okay...for all of you people that have been living in caves for the last year and have not yet seen American Beauty, go see it and don't read the rest of this review until you do, because I am about to give away the end.

Now, to those of you left, I would love to hear feedback from you about how you think the film should have ended.  Near the end of the movie Lester makes his final declaration of happiness to Angela, just before being left alone with his thoughts and a family photo. Lester makes his way to a table with the photo and sits down. Did anyone else notice the vase of perfectly garden-tended roses sitting on the table in front of him?  I did. And I have to say I was sorely disappointed when, as Lester's head was intruded upon by a bullet, the vase was not shattered and rose petals did not go flying around Lester's body in a symbolic flurry of raw beauty liberated from perfection. Sam Mendes being the brilliant director he is, makes me wonder if this resolution of the rose petals had not occurred to him. A penny for the thoughts of the editor and a look at the cutting room floor.    

American Beauty is well written, well acted, and well filmed, earning it it's rightful place in Oscar's limelight. The advantage of writing a review of a film that has been showing for quite some time, is that I heard many varying opinions of the picture before having the pleasure of viewing it myself and forming my own opinion. Though many people enjoyed American Beauty, I have heard from a great number of the viewing public that it was "weird", "strange", and "disturbing". To those people I can only say - look closer.