This movie moves so effortlessly in a million directions, that I struggled to recap it—but here goes nothing...Lester Burnham lives in the burbs and provides superficially for his career-crazy wife Carolyn and disinterested daughter Jane. Charging head-first into a mid-life crisis and at risk of losing his job, he finds himself sexually reawakened by his daughter’s friend Angela Hayes (gross). Lester begins to skirt responsibility, work out, smoke pot, and generally regress while Carolyn, looking for in-work what she can’t find at home, has an affair with a business competitor. Craving any form of positive attention, Jane begins to hang out with her strange, voyeur-spy neighbor Ricky and is introduced to his hyper-conservative family and collection of moment-in-time film recordings. The Burnhams continue to spiral away from each other in a strange tale that concludes with a bullet hole in the back of Lester’s head.
I loved this movie. Like, almost unfairly, because a pretentious, metaphor-laden commentary on the fallacies of modern American culture is sort of right up my alley. There’s so much to unpack in this story, from Lester’s devolution from father to teen (and back to father), to Angela’s reliance on sexual attention in the face of personal insecurities, to Carolyn’s struggle for self-respect, to Jane’s desire for affection in a loveless family, to Ricky’s search for survival and independence in a restrictive household, to the awkward, natural beauty in the ordinary against a backdrop of artificial America. Yeah, the Kevin Spacey stuff was already uncomfortable and aged even worse, considering how things turned out. But throw in a rich color scheme, Sam Mendes’ artful direction, and a collection of stories about escaping from the prisons we are placed in (and put ourselves in), and you have one of the great 90’s films.