American Beauty was the well-deserved winner of the Best Picture Oscar this year and the undisputed champion of black comedies. This is the story of a family finding happiness by coming apart - almost the direct opposite of any other comedy you've seen. Like Fight Club, there are still people who will refuse to "get" this movie, and I pity them; theirs is a smaller and less funny world. Kevin Spacey plays Lester, a sad-sack husband and father who seems to be failing in every aspect of his life, both professionally and personally. The ingenious twist is that we know from the film's very beginning that he's narrating the last days of his life, so there's no false suspense of whether he dies or not in the end. Who kills him and why is one of the film's central mysteries, but there is so much more to this layered slice of suburban ennui. After all, the trailers urged us to "look closer." As Spacey mentioned when receiving his Best Actor Oscar, even though you only get to see the bad side of Lester, you still grow to love him, and this theme opened our minds to welcoming anti-heros with a somewhat faulty moral compass into our filmic experiences. This tradition would later edge into television with James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, Bryan Cranston's Walter White on Breaking Bad, and Michael C. Hall's Dexter Morgan on the appropriately titled Dexter. Even Spacey himself currently plays the scheming though somehow endearing Congressman Frank Underwood on Netflix's House of Cards. "I rule!" exclaimed Spacey's Lester. Yes, you do.
Michael Perone has written for The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, The Island Ear (now titled Long Island Press), and The Long Island Voice, a short-lived spinoff of The Village Voice. He currently works as an Editor in Manhattan. And he still thinks Michael Keaton was the best Batman.
