The film is centred around the Burnham family. The film focuses on a suburban, American family portraying its characters’ dysfunctional relationships as a direct symptom of their conceptions of beauty. As the title implies the film asks the question ‘what is American beauty?’ The film doesn’t give a definite answer but implies many things such as the roses grown by Carolyn, Angela who seems to be the perfect American Beauty, the American Dream or to what we ourselves conceive to be beauty.

The main cast are Lester (Kevin Spacey) the father, Carolyn (Annette Benning) the mother and Jane (Thora Birch) the daughter. The audience follows the family throughout the film and witnesses the break-up of them.

The film begins with what seems to be a home video of Jane, someone offers to kill her father for her, she says ‘Yes, would you’ This makes the audience think that the film is going to have a murder theme and that Jane either hates her father or is extremely callous. The video also suggests spying and domestic melodrama and that the film could als

Some topics in this essay:
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