Product Description

Marking the feature film directorial debut of award-winning theatre director Sam Mendes this funny moving and shocking journey through life in suburban America follows the trials and tribulations of Lester (Kevin Spacey) and Carolyn (Annette Bening) an upper-middle class couple whose marriage - and lives - are slowly unraveling. Lester s wife hates him his daughter Jane regards him with contempt and his boss is positioning him for the ax. So Lester decides to make a few changes in his life; the freer he gets the happier he gets which is even more maddening to his wife and daughter. But Lester is about to learn that the ultimate freedom comes at the ultimate price. Winner of five Academy Awards: Best Picture Director Actor Screenplay and Cinematography.System Requirements:Starring: Kevin Spacey Annette Bening Thora Birch Chris Cooper Peter Gallagher Mena Suvari and Wes Bentley. Directed By: Sam Mendes. Running Time: 122 Min. Color. This film is presented in "Widescreen" format. Copyright 2000 Universal Distribution Corp.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 667068538229 Manufacturer No: 65382

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1190 in DVD
• Brand: AMERICAN BEAUTY (AWARDS EDITION) (DVD MOVIE)
• Model: 85382
• Released on: 2000-10-24
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 122 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
From its first gliding aerial shot of a generic suburban street, American Beauty moves with a mesmerizing confidence and acuity epitomized by Kevin Spacey's calm narration. Spacey is Lester Burnham, a harried Everyman whose midlife awakening is the spine of the story, and his very first lines hook us with their teasing fatalism--like Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis, Burnham tells us his story from beyond the grave.

It's an audacious start for a film that justifies that audacity. Weaving social satire, domestic tragedy, and whodunit into a single package, Alan Ball's first theatrical script dares to blur generic lines and keep us off balance, winking seamlessly from dark, scabrous comedy to deeply moving drama. The Burnham family joins the cinematic short list of great dysfunctional American families, as Lester is pitted against his manic, materialistic realtor wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening, making the most of a mostly unsympathetic role) and his sullen, contemptuous teenaged daughter, Jane (Thora Birch, utterly convincing in her edgy balance of self-absorption and wistful longing). Into their lives come two catalytic outsiders. A young cheerleader (Mena Suvari) jolts Lester into a sexual epiphany that blooms into a second adolescence. And an eerily calm young neighbor (Wes Bentley) transforms both Lester and Jane with his canny influence.

Credit another big-screen newcomer, English theatrical director Sam Mendes, with expertly juggling these potentially disjunctive elements into a superb ensemble piece that achieves a stylized pace without lapsing into transparent self-indulgence. Mendes has shrewdly insured his success with a solid crew of stage veterans, yet he's also made an inspired discovery in Bentley, whose Ricky Fitts becomes a fulcrum for both plot and theme. Cinematographer Conrad Hall's sumptuous visual design further elevates the film, infusing the beige interiors of the Burnhams' lives with vivid bursts of deep crimson, the color of roses--and of blood. --Sam Sutherland

DVD features
Given American Beauty's critical and box office reception, it's not surprising that cast and crew commentaries supplied in the DVD Awards Edition carry a self-congratulatory vigor, not just in the studio's featurette on the making of the film, but in the disc's special narrative content. On DVD American Beauty balances these supplemental components against the disc-space requirements for DTS digital audio as well as Dolby digital tracks. Even with that constraint, however, the disc inserts over three hours of additional content: a commentary track with screenwriter Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes illuminates how Ball's script was translated into Mendes's vision; a storyboard feature walks through the film's visual design, with Mendes and veteran cinematographer Conrad L. Hall dissecting its use of composition, color, special effects, and film and video stock; and viewers can scroll through the script itself in a special split-screen feature accessible in DVD-ROM drives. In addition to other online DVD-ROM options, the package includes production notes, two theatrical trailers, and biographies of cast and crew--all allowing DVD owners to follow the movie's ad slogan, "Look closer," quite literally. --Sam Sutherland

From The New Yorker
This amazing and impassioned fantasia about American loneliness begins as satire and ends with a vision of the sublime. The defeated suburban patriarch Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), condemned by his withdrawn daughter (Thora Birch) and his hyperorganized wife (Annette Bening), drops out of his job and misbehaves badly. After Lester's marriage gets blown apart by squalls of comic contempt, the movie, which was written by Alan Ball and directed by the British theatre maestro Sam Mendes (it's his first film), opens up and takes in Lester's suburban territory-the dissatisfactions of the business-mad nineties, in which the gospel of selfishness leaves people clenched and isolated. The bitter satirical riffs slowly give way to a mystical appreciation of the vagrant beauty trapped beneath the surface of life. The hard-edged, almost hyperreal cinematography, by Conrad L. Hall, and the editing, by Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, shift back and forth between dream and actuality with mesmerizing beauty. With Mena Suvari as a teen vamp who is terrified of being ordinary, and Wes Bentley as a young drug dealer who uses his video camera to discover the hidden connections among things. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

The world according to drama majors
The film's ending can be predicted after the first few scenes, unless one is completely unfamiliar with cookie cutter PC cliche-laden plot lines churned out by Hollywood's scriptwriting factories. (A quick quiz: in the land of Hollywood who is the ultimate villian -- the drug pusher, the cheating wife, the near-pedophile husband ... or, the man who won't come out of the closet?) A shallow film, about shallow people, given 5 stars by shallow reviewers.

One of my favorties from 1999
Anercian Beauty is one of the best movies I've ever seen. The film is very dark, very funny and tragic. Kevin Spacey did give a very Oscar worthy performance as did Annette Beinnig. Mena Suvair plays Angela with top notch as a young women who uses seduction for her own purposes but has her own secerets. Sam Mendes makes an amazing film his first time out. The cinematography by Conrad Ball is some of the best ever put on film.

Love it!
As evidenced by the many stellar reviews, this is a great, great film. The fact that it is so enormously popular speaks to the quiet desperation many of us sometimes feel in our mundane, humdrum lives...where most of your time is spent doing stuff you are obligated to do, not what you really want to do.

From the exterior, Kevin Spacey's character has a good job, a great house, a beautiful wife and a loving daughter. The fact is, he's miserable. I love how he is sick of keeping up appearances. I love how he decides to live life the way he wants to - telling his boss to buzz off, buying his dream car, working out and smoking pot - it's brilliant. If a lot of people were brave enough, they would probably admit that they might like to go on a similar adventure.

In short, the way the tale unfolds is sheer brilliance. The end is shocking and surprising, and very powerful. This is mandatory movie watching for any film buff.