Throughout the film “American Beauty”, the audience watches as the characters argue, fight, cry, and seduce their way through life, seeking to understand what it all means and why sometimes life has to be so difficult. As friends, lovers, and family members, they use one another as scapegoats and as modes of escape to avoid dealing with life- or, perhaps, to deal with life in the only way they know how. Most of the characters are self-obsessed, materialistic, and insecure to the point of neurosis and are completely unable to connect with other people, or really even themselves.
Carolyn Burnham is one of the neediest, most insecure characters in the movie. She spends most of the film trying and failing to find some source of reassurance to offset the isolation she feels. She chants mantras to herself, promising that she will do one thing or she will not do another, though she can’t fool even herself into thinking she has a chance of following through and finding happiness. The only character Carolyn connects with for even a little while is the arrogant Buddy Kane, who winds up abandoning her when her husband discovers their affair. Kane is far more concerned about his professional appearance than his romantic entanglements, and he selfishly leaves Carolyn behind to deal with the mess their affair has created. On the other hand, Lester Burnham, Carolyn’s husband, is not terribly upset about his wife sleeping with another man. He has felt isolated from his unfeeling wife for quite some time, and in fact finds it liberating that Carolyn is no longer trying to bend him to her idea of what a proper family is. He takes his new freedom from his wife’s control and runs with it. He starts smoking pot, working out, and quits his white-collar job to flip burgers, all in order to relive the happiest time of his life- his teens. He then takes the hunt for his lost happiness and youth a step further and seduces (and allows himself to be seduced by) his daughter’s best friend, a terribly insecure ‘beauty’ named Angela. Angela, meanwhile, is using both Lester and his daughter Jane to fuel her own search for herself. She puts up a front of confidence and success, when really she’s a scared little girl who is desperate for a way to feel special and loved. Angela feeds off of Lester’s sexual attention and off of Jane’s ‘plainness’ in order to separate herself from the ‘ordinary’ people she sees every day. The arrival of Jane’s new boyfriend, Ricky, makes this increasingly difficult for her. He calls her out on her behavior, declaring that Angela was never actually Jane’s friend but was really using her to increase her own confidence. Ricky also sees through Angela’s pretentious disguise and says to her face he finds her boring and plain. Ricky is himself an odd character. He toys with the emotions of other characters on several occasions, from egging his father on into two unnecessary physical confrontations to exposing Angela’s cruel method of finding self-assurance. On the other hand, he seems to be the only relatively happy character in the movie. His obsession with filming ordinary and sometimes gruesome things stems not just from a morbid sense of curiosity, but also from a deep-seated appreciation of the beauty that exists in the everyday world. He alone has a sense of self-confidence, and doesn’t feel ‘exposed’ or ‘naked’- even when Jane is filming him when he is very much physically naked.
Ricky is, sadly, the only character in the movie with a perception of his own self-worth. The other characters spend the entire movie flitting from one argument to another as they try desperately to find their calling, their soul mate, or their place in the crazy world they live in. Like families and neighbors often do, these characters have formed tight relationships- or perhaps just loose ones- which enable them to find new ways of learning about themselves and each other in meaningful ways. Even the missteps and missed opportunities offer lessons in how human beings interact with one another and how those interactions change the way people see each other and themselves.
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I wrote this one for a sociology class (Marriage and Family Relationships). Again, I had a two page limit, which I went over by just a tiny bit, once I put in the heading and everything. I'd never seen the movie before, and I've got to say- it's delightfully screwy.
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