Review of American Beauty
... To sum it up, these are two unhappy families whose lives are empty, superficial, lonely, false, and joyless. The story is about those individuals, and the efforts they make to improve their situation. All of these characters hide their depression in a different way. Lester, the father, has accepted his problems and took on a numb attitude. His wife, Carolyn, struggles to appear to others joyful, cheerful, and happy with her life. Since this is completely false and involves way too much energy to do, she often gives way to tears, frustration, and shameful sadness. However, she only does this when she is alone. Young daughter, Jane, takes yet another different approach to hide her gloom. She withdraws herself from her peers. She always tried to keep a very low profile and not draw any attention to herself. Ricky is Jane’s boyfriend who lives next door. He too has secrets, but mainly from his father. He's talks openly with Jane and with Lester; he tries to avoid his own family. There is Jane’s friend, Angela, and also the object of Lester's dreams, who feels quite free to criticize directly in a superficial way. When Ricky’s family first moves next door to the family, he is immediately drawn to Jane’s inner beauty and tries to film her. In the scene which Jane is in her room with Angela, Ricky is in his room filming her through his window. When Jane realizes that she is being filmed, she immediately closes her curtain. Her friend Angela on the other hand would love the attention; she re opens the curtains so that she can be filmed. Although the barely clothed Angela is dominating the screen, Ricky sees the beauty that is sitting behind her. He uses the zoom on his hand held camcorder to focus on the real and pure beauty. This would be the inner beauty of Jane. She is plain but real. Jane does not need to be the center of attention for her beauty to glow. The image of her smile reflecting off the mirror sitting on her desk is what captures Ricky’s craving to film her further. It’s almost as though her plainness has hypnotized him. Ricky finds beauty in what most would call ordinary. An example of this is in the scene when he is video recording a dead, white bird. When Jane questions his actions, Ricky simply replies, “Because it’s beautiful.” Even though normally a dead body would not be looked upon as beautiful, Ricky explains to Jane that it is amazing to see something so simple that no longer exists. For one second, you see beauty. Ricky finds beauty in places that others would fail to look. He believes life and everything around him is beautiful. He shows Jane a video of a bag floating in the air, “dancing with him”. The bag is being blown by the wind and seems to have an existence of its own. The ...