Word: spacey
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...AMERICAN BEAUTY Yes, some of the shots at suburbia are cheap. Yes, Kevin Spacey undergoes an all too familiar mid-life crisis. But Sam Mendes directs with vivifying freshness, and Spacey's wicked performance as the cynical, bedeviled protagonist is hands down the year's best...
...start of the movie, Lester Burnham (a brilliant Kevin Spacey), trapped and overly-insulated, leads a meaningless life with no sense of power or self-esteem; bogged down with particulars, he no longer knows how and when to express the proper emotions and can no longer communicate with his daughter or wife. Burnham eventually snaps this spell by developing a strong sexual fantasy for his daughter's 17-year-old friend, triggering an entirely hedonistic lifestyle in which he buys whatever he wants and smokes pot all day. This is a direct reaction to his prior condition of too much...
Needless to say, this is film about many things. Mostly, it is about a year in the life of Lester Burnham--father, neighbor, self-hater. Because Lester is played by Kevin Spacey, we can see embers glowing behind his eyes even in the darkly comic early stages of the film when he has hit rock bottom: disdained by his harpy wife (Annette Bening), despised by his daughter (lovely, sad-faced Thora Birch) and distant from his own passions. The highlight of his day, Spacey tells us, is a quiet masturbation session in the shower. "It's all downhill from there...
...Spacey finally plays his hand at a most inopportune moment, at his daughter's cheerleading show, in the form of a rejuvinating fantasy vision of his daughter's sexpot best friend Angela. Burning her way into his mind in a blizzard of rose petals, Angela reignites his sex drive, and soon he's claiming to be a new man: weightlifting, quitting work, bitching out his "joyless" wife for her materialism, and getting the 1970 Pontiac Firebird he always wanted. Because Spacey is such a delight to watch, digging into the material with wit, joy, and not a little smugness...
...refusal to play its characters' idiosyncrasies for shock value, and especially its amoral complicity in Lester's lesser actions. The film's tone is strangely gleeful, for instance, when Lester viciously berates his chilly wife.Winning an argument easily with a self-satisfied put-down that sadistically needles her insecurities, Spacey lets a devilish grin sneak across his face as if to say: ooh! that was fun. Trouble is, Lester's target (adeptly played by Bening) is so easy and his blow so gratuitous that one can't help feeling that he isn't being defiant and rebellious, but merely willfully...