Shortly after becoming obsessed with American Beauty , I bought a copy of Lolita. 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. Carolyn Burnham played by Annette Bening is the Charlotte Haze of American Beauty : wound-up, domineering, haggard, and weakly feminine beneath it all.
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. 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. Previous Next. What's Up With the Ending? Not exactly your typical happy Hollywood ending, right? Shock Rating. Contact us at letters time.
By Stephanie Zacharek. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Even while she is insecure and feels stupid for her decision, he earnestly comforts her, almost as he would a daughter, that she was beautiful, and confides in her about his family.
As her illicit relationship with Buddy comes to an end, Carolyn somehow begins to blame Lester for it, even unreasonably so, despite being the one who cheated.
This one is quite simple actually. His hard exterior eventually comes undone as he gives in and seeks physical support in Lester who he thinks is homosexual too. He is, in a way, inspired by how Lester embraced his own perceived homosexuality without a care in the world and made his wife agree to the arrangement, all of which is false but it is regardless what he construes from the conversation.
While everybody attached to the film, including the director, the writer Alan Ball, and several cineastes and film academicians who have put the film under a microscope for judging its various themes and motifs have deliberately refused to offer a single interpretation of the film, or a single theme that got to them, for me, it would be desire, and that too, one of an innate kind; at least in an overarching manner, since there are several of them that I believe find their roots in this one.
However, at this point I also must reiterate that the film is about this journey that the characters undertake: towards the attainment of those desires.
The destination to that journey is never reached, but all of them in the process realise the fleeting nature of beauty in and of itself, as something that can be found in the simplest of things, as they break away from their self-imposed imprisonment and exile.
The prison for each of them would be such: for Lester, it would be that of mundanity and having given in to a certain sedation that comes naturally as one progresses through life without actually getting somewhere.
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