The Realities and Illusions of Mendes' American Beauty

                In the film American Beauty, Lester Burnham and his family live quiet lives of desperation. Every single one of the family members is caught in this stark, real world of typical American suburbia. The fences are of the picket variety, perfectly painted white. Carolyn, Lester’s wife, tends to her American Roses with a pride. This real world captured and created so well by production designer Naomi Shohan, allows the audience to connect to typical suburbia by creating a very realistic and almost disconcertingly familiar mise-en-scene.

However, the suburban location throughout the film is where the realism of American Beauty ends. The viewer is swept up in Lester’s fantasies more than once consisting of erotic dreams of his daughter’s friend Angela. In his dreams, as in Lester’s reality, the rose motif carries over. Angela is frequently shrouded in rose petals from a dance scene at the beginning of the film to her taking a bath in a tub of petals nearer the end. Shohan and the director Mendes drift away from verisimilitude in the film and allow the viewer the opportunity to recognize that Lester is dreaming. The jumps from realism to anti-realism are smooth and consistent so the audience is never guessing if Lester is dreaming or actually experiencing his erotic fantasies. Though this film is not my favorite, the balance between anti-realism and realism is artfully performed by Mendes and his crew.