Sam Mendes
American Beauty

Last night, I felt compelled to rewatch the film "American Beauty", perhaps driven by the need sparked after watching another amusing film titled "Imogene" a little earlier, which featured Annette Bening, not one of my favorite actresses: but I've changed my mind now!
However, it was she who opened an abyss within me and made me fall into it.
In fact, in "Imogene" her role isn't primary, but she plays it with great professionalism, characterizing it to perfection.

Who knows what certain spiritual needs concretely adhere to: the chains of chance seem truly written in a book of perceptions that sometimes manifest by dictating choices, mistaken for instinct, motivating our spiritual and perceptive life, filling that void that was created and expanded without our complete awareness.

"American Beauty" is a work from 1999, although I saw it a few years later.
I do recall, however, the media success it had and the enormous resonance given to its soundtrack, which sounded very innovative.
Indeed, even without knowing what the movie was about concretely, it felt to me like a sort of point of no return, a watershed that would ferry us into the new millennium, the key that would enable the transition into a new era.
It contained, as if it were a harbinger of epochal renewal, an unstoppable modernity. The separation between past and future.

And this thought continued to seem correct to me during last night's viewing. I adhered to a sense of irreversibility.
Each image of the film is indeed tense, in its stillness, toward a tension unresolved except through rupture, via the crash of bad habits, of its oppressive shell; after the shell is cracked, it's easy to lean on the wings of the sustainable lightness of being - throw away the ballast!

The story revolves not only around the characters' events but also upon itself, seeking a turning point, a satisfaction, a meaning.
Each character supports and carries forward their theory of life by wearing a mask and thus dressed, seeks an imagined satisfaction, a longed-for goal that dispenses happiness to be reached, a place toward which to strive following a natural human inclination.

Ricky Fitts' (Wes Bentley) camera is the filter used to recognize oneself, to tell one's story, but also to reconnect to something that escapes the routine of things. The video tool becomes a fixed point of that continuous spinning, or rather, that contorting with affliction upon itself. The film's characters are objectively prey and hostage to a projection that since time immemorial (yes, since when?) has started that absurd game of pretenses behind which to barricade themselves, suffering greatly, and which instead, if the intuition were grasped to move a little further, one would discover an ability to glimpse another and much more important (rebalancing) point of view to place on those tired things now truly devoid of intrinsic value, dramatically changing the perspective.

The apparent tranquility of the neighborhood composed of garden villas, the setting from where the story originates, likely a residential area of a town, is just the dispersive, orderly, and bourgeois container, filled with the chaos of the lives of each character, temporally wedged at the dawn of the new millennium, within which some creaking, say, strong shaking, is detectable and audible in the provincial peace of that American society resulting from a prosperity inclined to decline, caught between the march of the armies of the digital revolution and the economic-financial crisis, witnessing even the identity change promoted by globalization.

The point of disintegration, of breakdown, of halt, sets in motion the recovery of oneself, initiating a psychological rehabilitation that is traumatic because it's impactful, dramatic, yet not guilty or cursed, quite the opposite.
The shattering of lives, previously entrenched behind an invisible screen hit at the Achilles' heel by something that desolately wandered for a while in the air, allows Sam Mendes' direction to observe their corpuscular disintegration under the scrutiny of the fateful turning point, resolving precisely at that moment the disfiguring tensions, even scraping off that patina of void that consumed the nerves and spirit beneath the seeming tranquility of the unresolved.

Pretending to be someone else to survive, wearing a misleading psychopathological mask, never rebelling against the social schema, continuing to play an undesired role on the social stage, in the privacy of the family, at work, at school, with friends, constantly repeating the silent mantra within 'things have to continue like this' to endure and not disintegrate that mask, has generated a debilitating intellectual weakening and dulling of the senses. Blindly following conventions has lost the 'why do we follow these conventions?'. The tables have turned.

The film remains effectively revolutionary and revisiting it after over three decades leads to rediscovering something positive that concerns us closely and that may have remained buried deep within us, like a precious treasure brought to light.
Moreover, it is a promoter of a memorable line of cinematic reflection that will vanish and dilute such relevant specifics in the following years, those of the confrontation with future challenges introduced by entering the new millennium (a period that will represent the world in its adolescent phase, a child of the internet and rampant consumerism, at the time of crisis), massively reviving those ephemeral values pertaining to being, further thickened by the social screen driving appearance and spiritual drift, but this time, subject to the rampant and even more obtuse (monstrous) conservatism and to that disarray - the common denominator of many lives - precisely of ignorance and human misery that characterized the relentless 2000-10 decade.