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When I was a teenager in the suburbs, I thought my life to be very romantic: the silence, the boredom, the lush, predictable scenery, the feeling of being trapped. My journal was filled with pseudo-profound revelations on the human condition.

I never shut up in English class. American Beauty was my favorite movie of all time. I loved it like a friend, and it could occasionally take precedence over my actual friends. I clearly remember shushing a room full of them when they happened to walk into my home during the final monologue. I loved this movie madly, fervently, religiously.I’m not alone.

Una Noche Cuban Movie With Subtitles

American Beauty is a famously beloved film that attracted feverish critical acclaim upon its release — fifteen years ago today — and went on to gross over $350 million worldwide. It earned widespread four-star reviews, enthusiastic thumbs up, 160 nominations, and 89 awards, including Oscars for Best Actor (going to ) and Best Picture. Statistics overwhelmingly support the notion that American Beauty is not just a good movie, but one of the best ever made.

But after years of contemplation, maturation, overall life experience, and one certificate in Women’s Studies, I’m here to tell you a potentially shocking revelation: American Beauty is not one of the best movies ever made. It may, in fact, be one of my least favorite movies of all time.I’m not the first person to call out American Beauty. It’s received the same kind of post-9/11 criticism as the similarly beloved Forrest Gump, and it was once the subject of the Videogum column But American Beauty is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

’ direction is exquisite, the cinematography is elegant and ingenious, and it’s filled with strong performances from some of the best actors of our time. There are plenty of worse movies than American Beauty in the world. But I could not have picked a worse film to fall in love with as a 16-year-old girl.Shortly after becoming obsessed with American Beauty, I bought a copy of Lolita. I’d read on an IMDb trivia page that American Beauty was (no surprise) inspired by the classic book, and screenwriter named his two principal characters after their literary equivalents.

Lester’s muse, Angela Hayes , takes her last name from Dolores Haze. No doubt influenced by Nabokov’s penchant for anagrams, Ball named the protagonist of American Beauty Lester Burnham: “Humbert learns.” Like Lolita, however, American Beauty is about a man who learns nothing. Lester is the same exploitative, violent, manipulative abuser as his namesake, but he comes in a different package. This time, Humbert Humbert is an idealistic baby boomer.Lester Burnham is the archetype of a suburban middle-aged man at the cusp of the new millennium. He works a dead-end office job for a boss several years younger than him.

He loves pot, Pink Floyd, and fast cars. He holds on to the images and ideas of the hippie era, but only in relation to his own goals. He’s obsessed with youth, but would rather feed off of it than try to understand it. He’s mad at the system, but doesn’t realize he’s now part of it.

To Lester, “the system” is mostly his wife, Carolyn.Carolyn Burnham (played by ) is the Charlotte Haze of American Beauty: wound-up, domineering, haggard, and weakly feminine beneath it all. To Lester, Carolyn is a “bloodless, money-grubbing freak” who “keeps his dick in a mason jar under the sink.” In the Vietnam War protest that is Lester’s life, Carolyn is his Nixon. Lester says Charlotte makes him feel “like a prisoner,” but the movie doesn’t make it clear how. We know he hates the music she plays while their family eats the dinner she makes for them, but that appears to be the only power Carolyn exerts over Lester. The further we go into American Beauty, the clearer it becomes that Carolyn is the real prisoner.Carolyn is a very successful woman with her own real estate company, Burnham & Associates.

She should, in the Liz Lemon sense, have it all, and she’s devoted to keeping that illusion alive. However, Carolyn is as unhappy with her marriage as Lester — probably even more so, as we learn that Lester pulls the strings in their relationship. Lester wants to stay married at all costs, despite his lack of desire for Carolyn and his fixation on a teenage girl. When Carolyn threatens to divorce him, he claims she has no grounds and that if she were to file, Lester could easily end up with half of everything she owns.Carolyn attempts to reclaim her power through guns and an affair with her rival, a man who, as opposed to Lester, actually inspires her. In the meantime, Lester quits his office job to work at a fast food restaurant, making Carolyn the sole breadwinner of their home. We only see Lester at his fast food job once: when he catches Carolyn and her lover kissing in her car. There is no imagery of the excruciating toil of minimum-wage service work, save for the dumbfounded faces of his coworkers when he asks to apply for a job.

Lester has the experience and pedigree to do whatever he wants, but he’d rather do nothing, especially because his wife will pay for it. No more “flipping burgers all summer just to buy an 8-Track” — he’s got the means to buy himself expensive weed and a vintage car. Carolyn is not Lester’s wife: she’s his rich mother, coerced into providing for him.Lester lives every day of his new life like it’s the summer before college. He worships youth in the form of two of his daughter Jane’s peers.

Lester’s hero, Ricky, is a pseudo-profound teenager who quits normal jobs, deals weed, and writes Jane’s name in fire on the Burnhams’ lawn. Lester’s muse and ultimate symbol of dewy youth is Angela, his daughter’s very glamorous, very underage friend. He’s obsessed with her from the moment he first sees her, but the only thing he knows about her is that she’s hot. After eavesdropping on her conversations with Jane, he learns, to his delight, that Angela is also lascivious and vapid.There are at least three Angelas. There’s the Angela we see through Lester’s leering gaze: an insatiable nymphet made romantic through her extreme beauty and youth. There’s the Angela we see with Jane: confident, vulgar, and delightfully tactless in the vein of Buffy-era Cordelia Chase. There’s the Angela we only see for a few moments: a vulnerable, insecure virgin who just wants someone to tell her she isn’t ordinary.

We’re given small windows into each of these personalities, but we never get the big picture. She’s on the poster, the artwork for the Thomas Newman score, the face of the entire movie, but she is just a body — a lower torso, really, not a person. She is Lolita, but viewed through the eyes of a predator who (unlike the blatantly lecherous Humbert, whom Nabokov loathed) we’re told to love.In all her personalities, Angela bears a striking resemblance to another modern-day Lolita, the controversial Lana Del Rey. Del Rey originally touted herself as what it’d be like if “Lolita got lost in the hood” (which is arguably what actually happens in the book), but she’s a lot more like Angela Haze all grown up. Angela is obsessed with male attention and mistakes lust for love. She has problematic views on how to get ahead as a woman. She’s widely perceived as vapid, but her reputation and image are carefully constructed.

She occasionally makes banal philosophical statements. She’s more than she appears to be, but nobody cares. This is pretty ironic for a movie that features her naked body on a poster with a tagline that reads, “Look closer.”Angela is an extreme symbol of misplaced paternal affection, as Lester gives her the praise and attention his daughter Jane deserves but doesn’t receive.

In what I think is American Beauty’s most important scene, Jane admits that she’s jealous of Angela for this very reason. She goes on to lament the inevitable psychological damage her father will cause her.

Ricky asks her if she’d like him to kill Lester. Jane directly faces his camera with a terrifying, determined look of rage.

Would you?”We eventually find out that Jane and Ricky are joking, but not before he turns off the camera. In a better-written movie, this tape would end up in evidence after Lester’s murder.

We’re led to believe Jane and Ricky run away to New York, so I can imagine it’d be easy for police to assume they killed her dad and hit the road. The same could be said of Carolyn, who might’ve shot Lester if someone hadn’t beaten her to it, but now has a weapon to get rid of.With this in mind, Lester’s death becomes the beginning of a huge mess the movie doesn’t cover. The ending is set up like a murder mystery, and the prime suspects are two people who have pretty strong reasons to kill him. Instead, Lester dies at the hands of an ultimately unnecessary character: a bigoted Marine who kissed Lester and liked it. If either Carolyn or Jane were to kill Lester, it could be read as a punishment for psychological abuse.

Instead, Lester is punished for being fuckable. He dies perfectly happy, full of dreamy thoughts of his wife and child, but free of any responsibility to them. Lester has almost certainly ruined his family’s life, but he doesn’t care. He’s free, man.There wasn’t much to worry about in the imaginary time Lester was alive.

Age Restricted Full Movie

It was easier for people in power to ignore struggles that didn’t resemble their own, considering the world was not yet so blatantly on fire. “ American Beauty is the very definition of a ‘pre-9/11 movie,’ if there is such a thing,” Gabe Delahaye writes in the aforementioned Videogum review. “It depicts and is of a world that no longer exists.”But I disagree, as I don’t believe the world of American Beauty has been destroyed yet. A lot of the world’s most powerful people look like Lester Burnham: white, male, middle-aged, well off, and bored to death. There are Lester Burnhams in public office, in the Supreme Court, at billion dollar corporations, at record labels and movie studios. These people in power aren’t happy, and this movie gives them what must be a very comforting message: let go of your responsibility, but not your power.

Don’t worry about what the world will look like after you die. You’ll be happy if you help yourself — not the people who need you.Because of its blissful ignorance, American Beauty is a movie our culture can no longer afford to lionize. It’s a beautifully directed movie that romanticizes some of our country’s biggest problems: disregard for class struggle, the commoditization of female bodies, and an exploitative obsession with youth. Lester wants the beauty and lack of responsibility that comes from youth, but he doesn’t care to know its burden, and he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to live with his parents or construct an identity in the midst of confusing messages. He doesn’t have to experience the ultimate powerlessness of youth and its resulting fear of the future.

Lester has no future, and he encourages his audience that they don’t have to have one either. One of his final lines is, “It’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world,” but it’s very easy for a dead man to say that.is a freelance writer who se work has appeared in BUST, Flavorwire, and The Toast. She is currently working in the service industry and doesn’t have much time to work out.Like what you see? Follow Decider on and to join the conversation, and to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!Photos: Dreamworks; Still courtesy Everett Collection.

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