Directed by Sam Mendes
American Beauty follows the final year in the life of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a suburbanite man in a shoddy marriage with a crappy job. One day he decides that he is going to change, so he quits his job and starts buying pot from the neighbor boy. That’s sort of the jam and biscuits summary of the film, but if you really want to get down to it this movie is all about Plato’s theory of ideas and how that theory works when interplayed with the excesses of America. I think that if you are cued into this reading of the film it morphs from a good movie to a really good movie.
But what about the law. There are just a few snippets:
1. There is mention of a property dispute in which Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) cuts down the neighbor’s tree. She justifies this by saying that a “substantial portion of the root structure” was on her property.
2. When Carolyn threatens to divorce Lester, he tells her that since he supported her while she got her real estate license that he would be entitled to half of everything. Rawk on Lester.
3. When Lester is on the verge of getting fired he demands a nice severance package. He supports his right to this by A) threatening to turn in information about his boss buying prostitutes with a company credit card to the IRS (since the way it was reported it would constitute fraud) and B) threatening a fake sexual harassment lawsuit against the man who is firing him. He does this on purely evidentiary grounds: “Can you prove that you didn’t?”
4. Finally, the order obsessed ex-marine father of the dope dealer says, “There are rules in life . . . you need structure, you need discipline.” Of course he just beat the crap out of his son.
