 According to the reviewer, Carolyn's preference for "Muzak" and "nutritious yet savory" food most likely symbolize:
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. 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. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. 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. 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. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan military picture on television: How's that for subtle?)
 The characters' desperate desire to be perceived as ordinary
 The characters' desperate desire to be perceived as ordinary  The deterioration of the American nuclear family  The tendency for people to be consumed by what their values  The dangers of standing out in a society that demands conformity