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Schule > Englisch > Ausarbeitungen, Interpretationen und Zusammenfassungen > Movies > American Beauty - Summary

Summary about "American Beauty

The film "American Beauty is a story about the 42 year's old frustrated family father Lester Burnham.
Already one of his first sentences in the film can tell much about his life:
Tomorrow I'm gonna be dead.

Lester's life is boring, and the masturbation at the morning is the only highpoint of his day.
His daughter, the typical teenager Jane, hates her father, and his hysterical wife Carolyn is so career-addicted, that she hasn't time for intimacy or something else. Their marriage is a dead marriage and just for show, so the other people think, they are a normal family.
For both women (and himself), Lester just isn't more than a giant loser.
After a basketballmatch Lestor meets his daughters best-friend Angela.
She fascinats him, and from this day on, he often has sexual dreams about her, naked - but always coated with many roseleafs...

When Angela is sleeping at Jane's house, she flirts with Lestor, and Jane is disgusted about the thought, that Angela would like to sleep with him.
One day, the boy next door, Ricky, who views life through a camera, gets interested in Jane and films her. But she just gets scared in the thought, he's a psycho.
When Lestor gets drugs from Ricky, he decides to chance his suburb-loser life.
From now on, Lestor trains his body (naked), smokes Pot everyday, and even when Carolyn notices it, he is totally careless about it.
He cuts his job, but not without to extort a big Compensation, from which he buys the car, he always wanted.

Meanwhile Carolyn starts an affair with a super-agent. She begins shoot-training and "wakes up from her frustrated life.
But also Ricky and Jane fall in love, and with help of his camera, he gets her bad self-value feeling better again.
One evening, after a big family quarrel, Jane strips for Ricky at the window, and he films it, but suddenly his neo-Nazi father, who is in the marine, comes into his room and knocks him down, because he found a video, where Ricky had filmed Lestor, while he were training naked.

On a rainy evening, Ricky's father goes to Lester, who trains in the garage, and talks with him about his family. When he finds out, that Lester just lives in a dead marriage and is careless about his wife and her affair with the super-agent, he kisses him. But Lestor tells him, better to go home again, because he isn't gay.
The same night, Angela sleeps at the Burnham's house, but after a quarrel, because Ricky and Jane decide to run away to New York, she is alone with Lester.
The two approach themselves and Lestor is totally fascinated about all her beauty.
They nearly sleep together, but it would have been Angela's first time, so they don't do.
Ricky's father is despaired, because he is scared, that Lestor tells someone, that he is gay, because that would ruin his marine-career.
So he brakes into the Burnham's house, and there he finds Lestor sitting at the kitchen table.
And because he can't see another way out - he shoots him right in his head.

Now Lestor is lying on his back, just watching the falling stars and the yellow leafs.
Because "It's so hard to stay mad, if there's so much beauty in the world.

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