Comparing Lester of American Beauty and Ricci of The Bicycle Thief Essa

Comparing Lester of American Beauty and Ricci of The Bicycle Thief In American Beauty Kevin Spacey who plays Lester lives a typical middle class life with his family. His wife is having an affair, his rebellious daughter doesn’t talk to him and his neighbors are psycho. In contrast The Bicycle Thief portrays a tight family. Riccis wife loves him, his behaved son talks to him and his neighbors are helpful when a crises occurs. In both of these films the main characters, Lester and Ricci, go through a responsibility stage. Both must make a life changing experience, either good or bad, that will have an effect on the people around them. Lester decides to make a few changes in his rut of life, changes that are less mid-life and more adolescence like. While he slowly goes through these changes on film one can see that the more responsibility he gives up the more happy he becomes. What he gives up to make him happy, though, only makes his family more hateful towards him. It isn’t that he gave up his responsibilities to improve his relationship with his daughter or improve it with his wife but to be selfish and gratify himself from what he lost when he was young. He does reckless and foolish things in this movie, but he doesn’t deceive himself, he knows he’s running wild--and chooses to. He let these feelings over power him and he almost let this irresponsibility get the best of him when he found himself alone with his daughters best friend. It’s perfectly natural to have feelings like he has toward her but there came a time with him when he saw what he was going to do was not right. So he refrained and actually gained a friend. (After he has been losing people left and right) His ability to refrain from his action... ...l up Ricci throughout his search encounters indifference to humanity and incivility of others. Ricci fights within himself to be the better person but only ends up in internal conflict with himself. He loses his respect for himself and we are astonished by his indecency toward other people of Riccis same impoverished disposition. On the other hand American Beauty dabbles with the question how uncivil and inhuman can someone lower themselves to over a short period of time. But Lester proves us wrong. His obsession with Angela in the end turns into an act of humanism and civility towards someone who is naive. Both of these main characters traits, at some point in everyone’s life, have delivered or even taught a lesson about refraining from some sort of action that could end up in consequences that are defiant against ones own code of conduct or someone else’s.