Writer, Alan Ball's (of Six Feet Under fame) first theatrical script blurs those stereotypical slow death in suburbia lines and keeps the viewer off balance throughout the entirety of the film.This film, is, above all, a deeply moving drama. The suburbanite, highly dysfunctional, Burnham Family is sad, enchanting, sickening, wonderful, confusing, tragic, abhorrent, and every other adjective listed in Websters. That is precisely what makes this film a true "one-of-a-kind".
Mr. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey)is daily pitted against his icy, cheating, manic, depressed, totally materialistic realtor of a psudo-wife, Carolyn (Annette Beining) and his quite sullen, self-absorbed, ambivolent, teenaged daughter, Jane (Thora Birch).
However, into Lester & Jane's lives come two very achingly beautiful & wonderful human beings. Jane's fellow cheerleader confidant Angela Hayes-note the Nabokov/Lolita reference in the last name-(Mena Suvari) who has a penchant for older men and a huge crush on Jane's daddy, jolts Lester into a sexual epiphany that makes Lester's life worth living again. He daily fantasizes about the young, sexy Angela. She makes him feel like a bumbling, pimplefaced teenager on his first date and all of these meetings between the two really blooms into kind of a second adolescence for the harried Lester. An eerily calm, young next door neighbor, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) and his lifelong Marine Corps father, Col. Frank Fitts, USMC (Chris Cooper) add much drama.
The whole cast turns out top-notch performances and the score, cinematography & direction are utterly "dreamlike".
Highly recommended!
Happy Watching!
