YMMV / American Beauty

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Lester Burnham a Henpecked Husband whose pot-smoking, burger-flipping, irresponsible rebellion long-overdue, or is he a jerkass Manchild who antagonizes his family in a case of Disproportionate Retribution — all while fantasizing about a girl his daughter's age as the climax of a long string of pathetic attempts to recapture his lost youth?
  • Is Angela a totally ugly, ordinary, shallow girl and Jane is a proud freak (in Ricky's words)? Or is Angela a desperate, lonely girl so desperate for acceptance among her peers that she tells wild stories and puts on a prissy personality just to stand out; and is Jane just an angst-filled teenager who demonized both her parents without trying to understand them, and attached herself to the wiser, more interesting Ricky?
• Award Snub: Despite the praise it received, Thomas Newman's score failed to win an Academy Award. Some also were disappointed that Chris Cooper didn't receive a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role.
• Awesome Music: "Any Other Name".
• Best Known for the Fanservice:
  • Mena Suvari naked on the ceiling with rose petals covering everything. Due to the Theiss Titillation Theory it's more remembered than the scene where she actually shows her breasts later on.
  • Thora Birch also goes topless, but this may go into Squick territory since she was only sixteen years of age.
• Condemned by History: The film was a huge hit on its 1999 release with both critics and audiences, winning the Best Picture Oscar in what is still acknowledged as a monumental year for Hollywood. However, 9/11 made its concerns seem shallow, and within 10 years people were reassessing it. In The New '10s, it has made more than a few "most overrated" film lists, and after #MeToo, the storyline with Lester and Angela began to seem too problematic to overlook the way most audiences had in 1999; it didn't help at all that Lester's actor Kevin Spacey had also been the subject of several allegations that he had molested young men. "The profound ideas at which [the film] grasped now seemed passé at best and clueless at worst," the Huffington Post wrote on the film's 20th anniversary. Interestingly, Sam Mendes and Alan Ball, the film's director and writer, accepted the film's declining reputation, with Mendes stating that he felt that his directorial debut was overpraised at the time of release, while Ball said that Spacey's current reputation made the film harder to watch in a current light. That being said, there is still an equal number of people who continue to praise the film for its artistic value while acknowledging its controversial premise from a modern-day lens.
• Designated Hero: Lester Burnham. The whole movie is supposedly him learning how to live his life again after being crushed by a boring, soul-crushing job, hyper-critical wife, and moody teenage daughter, but in doing so he makes everyone around him miserable. Lester develops a highly creepy and inappropriate crush on his daughter Janie's best friend, Angela. Then he quits his job and blackmails his boss into giving him a severance package, plus benefits, by threatening to accuse him of sexual harassment. When Carolyn calls him out for making her the sole breadwinner without even telling her beforehand, let alone discussing it, Lester counters that he already has another job...but it's working at a burger joint for minimum-wage because he wants to feel like a teenager again, and he violently throws a plate at the wall to scare Carolyn and Janie into shutting up. Then there's the fact his newfound "freedom" involves him regularly insulting his wife and daughter, and buying weed off his teenaged neighbor, Ricky. When Carolyn resorts to having an affair with Buddy King, Lester acts all superior over her when he catches them despite leching on a teenager. When Janie calls Lester out on how disgusting his crush on Angela is, he tells her she's "turning into a real bitch - just like your mother!". Even though Lester declines to sleep with Angela when the opportunity presents itself because he finds out she's a virgin, he was still willing to get a very vulnerable, emotional teenager naked. Despite all this his death at the end of the movie is framed as a tragedy and arguably it's only somewhat unfair because Frank killed Lester over being rejected and terrified he would be outed as gay.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: A few critics noted that while the film ultimately shows Lester's attraction to Angela as wrong, it still eroticises her anyway.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: For Jane. Hooray, she's escaped the soul-crushing banality of the suburbs and run off to New York!...at the age of 16, with her drug-dealer boyfriend. Also, her boyfriend's dad killed her father and is implied to have gotten away with it.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Angela nearly lets a friend's middle-aged father take her virginity, and tearfully admits how stupid she feels for it. In 2021, Mena Suvari revealed in her autobiography that, at the age of 12-13, she was stalked and, eventually, raped by a friend of her brother's and, for a long time, had an unhealthy view of sex. She also revealed that, at the age of 15, her agent tried to abuse her confidence and have sex with her, and, from 17 to 20, her boyfriend both sexually and psychologically abused her.
  • Thora Birch plays a teenager whose father struggles to connect with her. In the 2000s her own father (who acted as her manager) would cost her numerous roles because of his Stage Dad tendencies; he was the reason she was fired from the off-Broadway revival of Dracula and her career took a serious hit.
  • Ricky as a drug dealer is quite harsh when you realize that Wes Bentley fell into a bad drug habit after he couldn't deal with the fame of this movie.
  • Frank Fitts being convinced that Lester was having a pederastic relationship with his son Ricky and then coming out of the closet himself is all much more difficult to watch given Anthony Rapp's allegations that Kevin Spacey made unwanted advances towards him when the former was 14 and Spacey coming out as gay.
  • The whole character arc about an older man (played by Kevin Spacey) nearly taking the virginity of a teenager and stopping himself at the last minute when he realizes this is a terrible thing to do is newly awkward following numerous allegations from men that they had nonconsensual sexual experiences with Spacey when they were underage. Even before the allegations against Spacey came out, this may have also been seen in a new light by some after director Sam Mendes signed a petition calling for the release of Roman Polański, who was arrested in relation to his decades-old conviction for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl while attempting to enter Switzerland to attend a film festival, in 2009.
  • Lester blackmailing his former boss into agreeing to the terms of his severance package by threatening him with a sexual harassment charge is similarly uncomfortable to watch given the nature of Kevin Spacey's allegations.
  • Kevin Spacey's brother Randy Fowler said in a 2004 interview that their father was a racist who collected Nazi memorabilia and was physically and sexually abusive towards his children. This makes the whole character of Frank Fitts even more uncomfortable, as he is an abusive father who collects Nazi memorabilia and makes unwanted sexual advances towards Kevin Spacey's character.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In one scene, when Lester and Carolyn are driving to Jane's high school to watch her dance, Lester complains about "missing the James Bond marathon on TNT". This was about 13 years before this film's director wound up directing the 23rd James Bond film.
  • Lester having to turn down Frank Fitts, who mistakenly believes Lester to be gay, when Kevin Spacey has viewed himself as bisexual, and in 2017 declared he now would be living completely as a gay man.
  • Lex Luthor was killed by Norman Osborn.
• Hollywood Homely: Jane, particularly with regards to that whole "saving up for a boob job" thing. It might be intentional; she's meant to be beautiful, but has poor self-image. There's also the question of whether she's planning to get an enhancement or a reduction. Without the benefit of freeze-frame, it could be read either way. And works either way too! Based on the way she and Ricky acted when she said that, it seemed they were both aware of the irony that she no longer needed the money for such a thing. Time took care of it.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Carolyn treats her family more like employees or pieces of furniture to make her life look better than it actually is, and that's not to mention having an affair. However, looking at Lester's flashbacks of her, she was a happy woman once and just became obsessed with being perfect. She does seem genuinely remorseful when Lester busts her for her affair.
  • Angela is vapid and superficial, and it's possible she's only using Jane to feel better about herself. However, it's clear that the girl has defined her entire worth to be based on how she looks, and feels she doesn't have anything to offer the world besides her beauty. Her reaction to Ricky telling her she's ugly and ordinary is actually pretty sad.
  • Colonel Fitts is an abusive father as well as a stereotypical bigot. We later discover that the main reason he acts the way he does is that he needs a front of tough machismo to hide his homosexuality. Becomes something of a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds when he murders Lester. Lampshaded by Ricky, whose last words to his father are to say that he pities him (implying that Ricky knows or at least suspects his father's secret shame).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The image of Angela covered by rose petals is highly subject to parodies◊.
  • Caroline in the doorway watching Lester put his feet on the table.
  • "My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and at least once a day retiring to the men's room so I can jerk off, while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble hell."
  • "Today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus."
  • "Plastic bag! Plastic bag! Plastic bag!"^ExplanationMany have taken Tom Green's ADD-fueled chasing of a plastic bag from Clone High as a way to summarize the film in a single phrase.
• Narm:
  • While the message — that beauty is all around us if we know where to look — is fine, many viewers found the way that several of the characters regarded that little plastic bag blowing in the wind as being a little bit overwrought and pretentious. It's a bag caught in an updraft; it might make a very nice image, but it's hardly the cure for cancer or anything as groundbreaking or awe-inspiring as the characters seem to think it is. It's worse when you know the effect is completely artificial; there were two guys with leaf blowers standing just out of the frame to keep it moving for that long.
  • Kevin Spacey's frozen, slack-jawed expression that the camera zooms in on when he sees Angela for the first time, though he's probably meant to look dumb there.
• Nightmare Fuel: Anytime Ricky is beaten up by Frank.
• Retroactive Recognition: The hand model for the film's poster is Christina Hendricks.
• Signature Scene: Lester imagining a naked Angela above him, surrounded and covered by roses.
• Spiritual Successor: The film provided much of the inspiration for Desperate Housewives, with its Posthumous Narration and exploration of the darker side of suburbia.
  • And it is itself arguably a Spiritual Successor of such famous "middle-aged adultery" comedies as The Seven Year Itch and 10 (1979), albeit much darker than them, as well as melodramas from The '50s such as Bigger Than Life (also a film about an American patriarch who feels jaded with Conspicuous Consumption and a mid-life crisis).
  • In many ways, American Beauty is a spiritual successor to Literature/Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Both stories explore the shallowness and boredom of middle-class American life through the experience of a white-collar worker who seems to be living well, yet casts off his previous existence for something more rebellious but proves not to be as meaningful as he thought, and comes back enlightened and ready to make a more serious change.
  • Little Children could be considered an unofficial Spiritual Successor, as it shares the same theme of the dark root of suburbia, albeit with less Black Comedy, and also is scored by Thomas Newman.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Like several other movies released that same year, such as Fight Club and especially Office Space, this film's depiction of the (predominantly white) American middle class as lacking a clear sense of vision and identity thanks to the banality of day-to-day life, a social issue that has been rendered mostly irrelevant after events such as 9/11, the 2008 recession, and the rise of social media, firmly roots it to the late '90s. Also, Lester's pot smoking being depicted as rebellious would be pretty quaint considering the more relaxed views surrounding marijuana in The New '10s.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Many viewers don't feel much sympathy for Lester, considering that he quits his job to live a selfish Manchild lifestyle while ignoring his family's emotional needs. His essentially fantasizing about committing statutory rape doesn't help either.
  • Ricky comes across to some viewers as a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual Know-Nothing Know-It-All who seems more deep than he really is, particularly with the way he gushes over what is essentially just some trash blowing in the wind as if it actually means something. Not to mention that his both filming living people without their consent as well as the dead bodies of animals and people alike is just plain creepy.
• Values Dissonance: The criticism from most of the negative reviewers came mostly about the film appearing to glamorize Lester's chosen lifestyle after he starts neglecting his responsibilities to his family in favor of buying drugs from and trying to seduce high-school students as a middle-aged man, as well as further trying to avoid responsibility by getting an entry-level job, despite his family's middle-class lifestyle and daughter approaching college age (and also despite the fact that he had blackmailed his way into a nice severance package beforehand and therefore didn't really need a job). In the decades since the film's 1999 release, it's much more difficult for viewers to sympathize with Lester's boredom with his comfortable life and his attempts to find fulfillment, especially after the 9/11 attacks and the Great Recession made a huge impact on American culture.
• Values Resonance: With the COVID-19 pandemic and the following Great Resignation, Lester quitting his unfulfilling job and getting a different one that makes him happy is seen a lot more favorably.
• The Woobie:
  • Jane, who feels worthless at the beginning of the film. Her relationship with Ricky is down to him being the first person to show her real attention as a person.
  • Ricky too, considering he lives with an abusive father and a depressed mother with dementia. He's also a bully victim and mocked at school for being different.
  • Lester at the start even if he hides it beneath layers of sarcasm. Anyone who has ever felt that their best days are behind them and felt that horrible sense of being detached from life will definitely relate.

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