American Beauty Film Techniques

Look closer. The chilling tag-line of multi award winning American Beauty has great relatability, from the lives of all of the characters to the hidden beauty on showcase throughout the film. It cannot simply be filed into one genre, instead being a drama, comedy, tragedy and more. Director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball fine-tuned the film, resulting in a triumph of writing, acting and directing.
The movie follows the last few months of everyman Lester Burnham’s (played by the seemingly ideal Kevin Spacey) life, while he makes a dramatic change from being left high and dry from his job, family and social life, to a life mirroring his adolescence. At the very beginning, we learn that he dies later in the year, and possibly by his next
The entire aspect of the films plot is extremely believable and also relatable. Director Sam Mendes also performed well on his debut, bringing very elaborate techniques and helped emphasise Ball’s main ideas. They were able to capture the themes through many effective film techniques, such as the motifs. What is universally liked about Ball in this film is his inspiration to write the script, which was him watching a plastic bag flying through the wind at the World Trade Centre, an extremely memorable event in the film as one of Ricky’s videos of beauty. Despite this ironic and iconic feature, Ball and Mendes worked together to produce this multi award winning film, especially being commended for how relatable the plot and life of Spacey. This is achieved in cooperation with Spacey’s remarkable acting performance to showing a typical American guy who hates his job and has no other interests outside of work, but turns into an awe-inspiring sociopath. However, the script was hard to believe at one time, and that was when Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) had complete acceptance to completely leave her old life behind and live in New York with Bently. But yet this is only a small flaw in an otherwise great