Religion & American Beauty
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Religion & American Beauty
Casta Casta 1
May 9, 2007
RELST 292
Final Exam
American Beauty
Academy Award winning director Sam Mendes is responsible for many marvelous movies such as “Jarhead” and “Road to Perdition”. Mendes is not only an acclaimed film director, but he also is a masterful background in stage direction as well, including the 1998 stage production of “Cabaret” with Alan Cumming. Although Mendes is not known publicly to be a very spiritual person, his films represent models of faith and spirituality in a complimentary way every one of his stories. Even though spirituality is common in all of his films, there is no better example of it than in his 1999 directorial debut, “American Beauty”.
In the movie “American Beauty” there is a strong underlining of faith and spirituality that can be seen as almost a transparent overlay on top of the story. The literal message of faith and spirituality doesn’t seem to be there at the beginning of the film but, the message is there. The tag line for “American Beauty” is, “look closer…”, and that line can be seen in the background of various shots throughout the film. The phrase is asking the audience to not see exactly what they are viewing, but look for the deeper meaning. Mendes is simply asking the audience to look closer and find the meaning behind all this mayhem. On the surface, Lester is a man with family issues, marriage problems and trouble at work, who looks to escape with the use of illegal drugs, blackmail and an act that the law would list as statutory rape. But by looking closer, we find a man struggling to find what life is all about. It’s not just Lester who is
looking for what life really is either, but it seems that everyone involved in the film’s story is as well. The audience could question that this is a very askew way of looking at faith and spiritually yet; the best retort would say that it’s a very truthful and modern way to look at it. Society is as you see it. If you...