This movie feels really outdated now
Homophobia and marijuana. Wow so edgy.
shareEven at the time, it was inferior to the brilliant The Ice Storm from a couple of years earlier. Now THAT is a definitive portrayal of suburban angst and tragically dysfunctional families. American Beauty is very well-acted, handsomely shot and highly entertaining, but it’s mostly surface.
shareIt looks better than American Beauty. But there nothing more annoying than Filmmakers trying to say this how everybody life is like. When that not remotely the case. Which is half the problem i have with American Beauty.
shareI know, right? The entertainment industry has been bombarding us with this message for decades, at least those in it who style themselves as "edgy," or people with "something to say." Look at Mad Men, set in the oh-so-stylish Kennedy era, arguably the pinnacle of American power and confidence. Every male character is a despicable, philandering, sexist pig who leads a pathetically empty life devoid of real meaning. Every suburban scene positively drips with the implication that these people all live utterly superficial, meaningless, shallow, phony lives, wearing polite smiles that they show each other, even as they connive and gossip maliciously behind each others' backs. And no one, but no one is actually happy. Every man and woman walks through life like a robot, doing what's expected and appropriate, and all secretly unhappy and unfulfilled. There are no characters who really like their jobs, no husbands and fathers who truly love their wives and children, no wives who are genuinely happy to be raising their kids because they love them and love motherhood, etc.
Or listen to the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday," written by hippies Gerry Goffin and Carole King. It paints idyllic suburban life as an empty existence of crass commercialism and suburbia itself as "status symbol land."
It's always been stylish for some people to sneer at middle-class suburban life, while those of us who actually live it, find it a wonderful existence -- and unlike the elite scolds who sneer at us, we are actually happy, and grateful not to have lived our lives slaving away sunup to sundown to scratch out a bare subsistence living of backbreaking labor, in grinding poverty, the 99% of humanity had to do before the industrial revolution. In other words, we're not stuck up ingrates.