American Beauty: Looking Closer

A lot of people try to "look closer" to analyse the movie, but they don't realise that they're facing the wrong direction.

A great saying that holds a great deal of truth for this movie is: "Before you can help others, you have to help yourself." Now this may sound like a selfich attitude but it's not. It basically means that if you're not the best person you can possibly be, then how can you expect to mend the relationships you have with the people around you? Lester found himself in a rut at the age of 42 and he wasn't sure what went wrong or how to fix it. Meeting Angela was merely his inspiration to re-invent himself, to recapture his happiness and the meaning in his life. Of course most of his actions that follow are self-centred but that's because he tries to recapture his happiness by mentally going back to a time in his life when he was happy - his youth. If you imagine that Carolyn would have been very similar to Angela when she was a teenager (hence Lester's fascination w...