American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)

Presented as a dark and cynical satire of the American middle-class, American Beauty is a film that touches themes as life, career, sexuality, redemption, family and freedom. Our protagonist is having a midlife crisis and he is trying to transform his life from the absolute pretentious lie that it was, to something true and valuable. American Beauty is one of the greatest American films that the 90s gave to us. Its satirical character along with the bleak images of a life that is totally unfulfilling and wasted are the vehicles upon which a story of personal re-evaluation and thorough self-criticism is been build. American Beauty is the story of people who are unable to live their lives as happy individuals. The protagonist is unhappy, his wife is unhappy and his daughter is unhappy. The whole family is a miserable image of a kind of bond that exists between them that now there is only materialistic value in it. The film dives deep into some type of nihilism only to come up on the surface again with a somehow cleverly put and down-to-earth didactic comment about living and loving. American Beauty seems to shatter only, but in reality is building a new life from the ashes of the old one. It's like you need to go down to hell in order to see paradise. American Beauty is a film that clearly provokes the "settled" of this world, you know the ones who think that they have solved any kind of problem in their life and the only thing that stays for them is a monotonous, odourless routine. The day to day life is presented as an opportunity to fix things, to change things, to reconsider things, instead of standing there and observing you life going by before your eyes. In a weird and highly idiosyncratic way, American Beauty is a very optimistic movie, it shows that there is hope even for the ones that seem doomed to walk in absolute failure. It shows that inside every "dead man" there is a spark of life that with the right kind of triggering event can wake up and stand proudly against the true needs of his life. American Beauty is a movie that uncovers the lie behind the happy façade, is a movie that looks inside of a man with a goal to look inside his soul and not simply at his face. American Beauty is insolent, dark, bleak and takes its power from the fact that humans tend to secure their place and live a secure life no matter how shitty, fake and pretentious that is.