American Beauty song question?

Question

When Lester goes into the living room and finds Angela waiting for him...the song 'Don't Let It Bring You Down' by Annie Lennox (written by Neil Young) is played. Does the music or lyrics of the song have any significance to the scene? Does it symbolize anything about Lester and Angela?

Answer 1

As the film crescendos to climax, its frequent and variegated use of pop music virtually stops. With viewers having become accustomed to the stereo playing in Mendes’ America, its conspicuous absence creates a disturbing tempo, the strained silence we associate with the Fitts’ house seeming to somehow filter through the red door of the Burnham’s house on Robin Hood Trail, the camera enduring in one place longer and longer as it methodically moves from one character in crisis to another with only the abbreviated tones of Newman’s piano and the sound of rain accompanying it. Only Annie Lennox’s s**y cover of Neil Young’s “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” punctures the comparative silence of the film’s last twenty minutes, the stereo coming softly back into the film as Angela tries to attract Lester to the living room following Ricky’s ‘revelation’ about her character. The wily old rock veteran’s lyrics sound as sage coming from Lennox as they do from the man himself, Lennox’s silky voice acting first as the perfect accompaniment to the scene’s slow seduction, the song’s tone quickly becoming as inconsistent as it was, moments before, appropriate, Angela having crushed the fantasy with the revelation that it is “her first time.” While they shouldn’t let it bring them down, the on-screen moment is a metaphorical instance of castles burning, as the rosy, fantasy-driven exterior of the “American Beauty” burns down, uncovering, in its wake, the timid, small-breasted girl who, like his wife, has willfully developed a false public self, the worse part being Lester’s firm belief in such an easily-torched structure (did I take that metaphor too far?).