Kevin Spacey: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

2. Lester Burnham - American Beauty

This cocktail is called... the Classic Spacey. Everyone has seen, or at least should have seen, American Beauty. The film won five Oscars in 1999, with an amazing 109 other awards and a further 81 nominations, making this film enormously successful. American Beauty deals with Lester Burnham's mid-life crisis, failing marriage and socially damning infatuation with his daughter's beautiful, seductive friend, who happens to be an underaged teenage girl. The film explores the problems of a middle aged man and how he struggles to solve those problems arising from his urges, in a society that dictates his natural urges as wrong. In the modern climate of familiarity with the concept of paedophilia, and the subtle ways that crime can be expressed, the film takes on an amazing new context and stands stronger today than it ever has.