I'd sent this as a PM, to someone on this forum.Andrewww wrote:I dunno, American Beauty didn't really seem like a movie about being happier abroad. I saw it a few years ago so I might not remember everything but to me it was mostly about how appearances can be deceiving and that the American Dream is just an illusion.
The movie, "American Beauty" is an omen, it almost predicts the life of anywhere from 50 to 75% of men in this country.
In reality, Kevin Spacey's character had no way out. In America, if he pursued Mena Suvari's adolescent character, he's both a pedophile & a pervert. Next, his wife had decided that his rebellion (awakening, if you want to call it) had gone far enough, and was ready to kill him. In fact, the ex-marine saved her from facing the DA's office for 1st or 2nd degree murder.
When I'd seen that movie, I knew in my heart, that marriage and a happy family life in America was over. What Spacey did, upon the moment of his death, was justify a series of life decisions [ the life he'd created w/ Benning & Birch ], because for a brief instant, he'd believed that any appreciation, even if those things were destroying him on the inside, was the essence (call it the *beauty*) of his life. Well, in my opinion, it was his life ... a life wasted.
A decade later, folks at Happier Abroad, are now addressing those decisions and seeing that making one decision, not dating Annette Benning [ the AW], not accepting conformity, may help avoid one's death [ not just physical, but emotional & psychological ] . I'd started on that path, not too long after "American Beauty".