 What is the plot of American Beauty?
Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket fence. Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. Ambient noise falls away, the crowd disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for him. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a bath of red petals. The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director (his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Aided by his cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a meltdown. A merican Beauty is so wittily written and gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie.
 An American nuclear family is on the verge of a meltdown.
 A middle-aged man tries to seduce a high school cheerleader.  A middle-aged couple's marriage breaks down.  A middle-aged man goes through a mid-life crisis.  An American nuclear family is on the verge of a meltdown.