美国丽人英文影评

美国丽人英文影评内容摘要：

d by her father or someone resembling him, to be anywhere but where she is, in a room where her mother is melting down before her eyes — save American Beauty from ic, surreal overkill. She anchors the film’s easy target hysterics in a character whose face — more than any dialogue or situation — registers the dark nuances of adolescent fear, disgust and longing. However, most critical attention has been centered on the movie’s insights into Lester’s horrific existence. This is understandable, as he is the narrator. Right off the bat he tells us, This is my life. In less than a year, I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. In a way I’m dead already. The language is brutal and lyrical. The scene beneath the voiceover is alarmingly sterile but extremely familiar: an overhead shot of a suburban neighborhood, all the houses alike, all the streets going nowhere. In an instant, he’s sympathetic, the heart of the film. You anticipate and dread his death, and wonder who will be responsible. You’re led to believe that it’s Jane, indirectly or other wise. The very first shot in the film is her face, on video, pouting. She’s talking to whoever holds the camera, whom we learn later is her boyfriend, a strange, desperate and abused new neighbor named Ricky (Wes Bentley). He affords his elaborate entertainment system by selling pot (to her dad) but he spends most of his time videotaping everyone, in particular Jane at all hours, from any position he can manage, as she crosses her lawn, gossips in the schoolyard, passes by her bedroom window. In this first scene, she talks about how unhappy she is, and how much she dislikes Lester. I need a father who’s a role model, she says. Someone should put him out of his misery. Off camera, Ricky offers to kill him for her. This offer is certainly foreboding, especially since it’s followed by Lester’s announcement of his imminent demise. As the action proceeds, Jane is revealed as being typically teenagerish in her wrath: that is, not convinced that what she thinks she wants is really what she wants. (Angela says that the worst thing is to be ordinary, and Jane believes her for most of the film, also accepting Angela’s plainly unfounded judgment that she — Jane — is ordinary.) She’s also passive and fearful, despite her desperation, characteristics she’s absorbed f rom Lester and Carolyn (who sells real estate badly and has an affair with the local real estate king, played by Peter Gallagher). But Ricky, he’s another story: a ticking time bomb, embodying the stereotype that suburban white boys are fast being in today’s mass media eye. His backstory includes a pathologically passive mom (Allison Janney) and a menacing dad, Marine Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper, devastating in a truly troubling role). Fitts’ salient traits are ruthlessness, rigidity and homophob ia — the ’90s insta signs of imminent suburbanguy breakdown — which definitively set him apart from Lester, who genuinely likes his gay neighbors and who bees remarkably flexible once he loses his advertising job and falls in love with Angela. This latter development es to resembles Lolita, in that Angela relis。