American Beauty (1999) on Netflix
Lester Burnham despises his job, his marriage and his suburban life. At his daughter's school basketball game he becomes infatuated with her best friend Angela and decides to change his life.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb8.3/101,288,536 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
Lester Burnham, a middle-aged advertising executive in an American suburb, hates his job and his unhappy marriage to Carolyn, a status-obsessed real estate agent. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Jane resents both of them. New neighbors arrive: Colonel Frank Fitts, his wife Barbara, and their son Ricky, who films what he sees around him with a camcorder and pays for his supplies by selling marijuana. At a school basketball game Lester becomes fixated on Jane's best friend Angela Hayes, who boasts to classmates about her sexual experience. He quits his job, blackmails his supervisor for a severance package, works as a fry cook and buys a 1970 Pontiac Firebird.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about American Beauty (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Alan Ball took the film's plastic-bag image from life: in about 1991-92 he saw a bag blowing in the wind outside the World Trade Center, watched it for ten minutes, and said later that it provoked an "unexpected emotional response".
- DreamWorks suggested Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner and John Travolta to play Lester, and the role was also offered to Chevy Chase, who turned it down, while Helen Hunt or Holly Hunter were proposed to play Carolyn.
- Kirsten Dunst was offered the role of Angela Hayes but turned it down because of the character's and Lester's sexual behaviors, choosing The Virgin Suicides instead; Sarah Michelle Gellar also declined the role, over scheduling conflicts with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
- Sam Mendes took the minimum salary allowed under Directors Guild of America rules, $150,000, to direct the film, and later recalled that after taxes and his agent's commission he earned only $38,000.
- For the plastic-bag footage Sam Mendes used wind machines to move the bag in the air. The scene took four takes: two shot by the second unit did not satisfy him, and for the last attempt he moved to the front of a brick wall and added leaves on the ground.
- The 2000 MTV Movie Awards nominated the kiss between Kevin Spacey's Lester and Mena Suvari's Angela for Best Kiss, but DreamWorks refused MTV's request for a clip, saying it did not want to glorify the "inappropriate" kiss between a 42-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl, and MTV rescinded the nomination.
