MovieChat Forums > Arlen Faber (2009) Discussion > SPOILER - Everyone just accepts Arlen sp...

SPOILER - Everyone just accepts Arlen spoke to God

posted 15 years ago by spookycopter
14 replies | jump to latest

I found the human story in this movie to be quite well developed. You had multiple characters with painful pasts trying to find meaning in life. You had people growing to be friends and people supporting each other.

All of which did not require the 'hotline-to-God' sub-plot. Everyone in the movie, everyone without exception believed that Arlen truly spoke to God. Everyone had faith that he was telling the truth because of his comforting positive words in the book.

It was quite obvious from the first time we see Arlan that he is a sham.

In the last 5 minutes he admits that God actually really didn't speak to him at all. That he used his imagination to write his wonderful words. I imagine in the next revision of the Bible that the steering committee might add this offense to the existing commandments as one of the bad ones, but in this movie, its fine. No problem. Thank goodness is was the Christian God he was using his imagination about.

A bone was thrown to the gullible members of the audience that felt cheated of the fantasy of an author that could truly speak to the creator that maybe God had intervened in Arlen's thoughts to pass his messages of hope and love to Arlen behind the scenes. Or a more likely explanation is that Arlen is a seriously creative, empathic individual that developed his own model of God that matched the world he saw around him.

So, I enjoyed the human message in the movie but I wish they would have toned down the faith message. At the end everyone who had blind faith looked foolish for believing in his nonsense and as his punishment, he got the girl. Kind of a mess as a movie, and one in which all the characters are too gullable to care for with the exception of Arlen.

[–] mauritsmedm 15 years ago

yeah I thought of that aswell, or I rather never understood until the end that people actually thought that he could speak with good. On the other hand i'm an atheist and don't belive there is a god at all.

[–] thefirstpbj 15 years ago

Jerk. You say spoiler and what the you're spoiling in the title? Next time try something a bit more, eg: "Spoiler - Ending" or w/e

[–] reversi 15 years ago

ha ha ha. oh my, that didn't spoil too much, did it? no need to be rude...anyway, i thought the same. i was really confused when people all felt let down when arlen explainewd how he wrote the book by using his own answers. i thought that clear right from the beginning. but then i aint religious as well.

[–] 15 years ago

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[–] leojbramble 14 years ago

Really enjoyed this movie, but was slightly irritated at the end when it became clear that some people actually thought he... spoke to... 'God'? Some external mythical being? Bizarre to me that aside from the usual extremist wackos, a normal religious/spiritual person would conceive of communication with 'God' as anything other than exactly what Faber did. Anyway, aside from that, I'm glad Netflix suggested this film I'd never heard of. Thought all three pricipal actors did really nice work, particularly the bookstore owner; Lauren Graham is too cute.

[–] TayshaWaffles 14 years ago

70% of Americans would believe Faber actually talked to god. The fact that he came up with some good advice for the bookstore owner from his own mind is what makes it a good movie.

[–] jmarsh3695 14 years ago

It's not that everyone believes Arlen spoke to God. It's that everyone wanted to believe that Arlen spoke to God. The fear of most of mankind is that there is nothing after life, that we are alone in the universe with no reason or purpose. People want proof of God's existence, and look for it in ways that might not seem rational when you take a step back and look at the full picture. Arlen's point about how he wrote his book is in line with the concept of the Holy Spirit: He may not have had a verbal conversation with God, but God conversed with him through the Holy Spirit, which resulted in the words he put on the page. That's essentially what Arlen admits near the end of his speech to the crowd. Maybe that is how God communicates with us. The point of the movie simply is that it doesn't matter whether God spoke to Arlen: we are all capable of bettering our lives and becoming happier if we look inside of ourselves for some of the answers. If that involves developing a relationship with God, then all the better.

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] cableaddict 14 years ago

I thought it was very obvious from the first few minutes thta he was a sham. That was an important part of the movie's point, as mentioned above. He was an extremely flawed man, who yet had real insight into the human condition.

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] bite_me_loser_86 13 years ago

But they want to believe that those who wrote the Gospels, or who perform faith healings, believe in what they are doing and have faith that they are doing God's work. And if they were to find out otherwise, they would feel betrayed.

That's disturbing. Religion is a big deal for a lot of people and the foundation for which they base a lot of life choices. If the religion is based on a book, such as the Bible, it seems insane to me that anyone would want to waste their life following it simply because they believe the people who wrote it "believe in what they are doing and are doing God's work".
Personally I wouldn't get on a plane flown by someone who isn't actually a pilot and doesn't have any training but truly "believes and has faith" that he's a pilot. Either he is a pilot or he isn't. What he himself believes means absolutelty nothing to me.
There are plenty of psychotic people in this word that will tell you the craziest stories and they DO believe in them. But just because these crazy people believe in the stories they tell doesn't make them any more true. Truth is objective. Either the Bible was inspired by God or it wasn't. And if I were to base my life choices on the Bible the sole guarantee that the writers were sincere wouldn't be enough. Because who knows, maybe those writers were in fact psychotic. And psychotic people ARE sincere... but they're still WRONG.

With that I want to say... the people in this movie that blindly believed this random author in fact could speak directly to God... they were gullible idiots. Because even if he wasn't a liar (which he was) he could still be CRAZY.

[–] Random Terrain 13 years ago

Have you ever heard of the book Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch? Millions of people believe that God answered his questions.

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http://www.randomterrain.com/ - Free nude pixels.

[–] john-579 13 years ago

You know, I think I missed this idea, because I didn't think he'd actually talked to God. This made the slavishness of the mail carrier in trying to find out if there's a Hell not make a lot of sense to me. Thanks; this gives me context.

Yours truly,

John Hedtke
Author/Consultant/Freelance Writer
www.hedtke.com

[–] steamedsoup 10 years ago

I found it odd that everyone so easily believed him at first. It almost seemed silly to the point of undermining the movie for me at first.

But, as I thought about it, it didn't seem like problem. People probably wanted to believe it because they liked the answers to the questions in his "interview" with God so much, they wanted it all to be true. Also, they made a point of saying Arlen had 10% of the "God market," meaning there's a certain, specific crowd of people who go out of their way to buy these religious books and 10% of that crowd bought the book and a decent chunk of those people believed him. It's not like the whole world believed it; just a bunch contained within that narrow 10% sliver of the kind of people who buy those kinds of books in the first place. Maybe because we saw so much of the world through Arlen's paranoid, narcissistic eyes, but sometimes we were misled into thinking he was a much bigger deal than he was. It was still possible for him to namedrop his own name and have people in the room not bat an eye (like the chiropractor when he first told her his name).

Plus, every now and then you read headlines about how a poll shows that 8 in 10 Americans believes in angels. Lots of people believe in things without any real evidence to back up that faith. Sometimes people just believe things because they so love the idea of those things. In this film, the people so loved the idea that the answers in that book were really from God.

On top of that, lots of the people probably don't feel it was a sham even when he admitted he didn't hear the actual voice of God. The idea of a hotline to God is a sham, but the idea he talked about in his speech at the end is that the whole point is that God doesn't answer to you the way you wish he does. So all you can do is ask the questions and wait for the answers to come to you, and some of the answers that occur to you might be coming from yourself and some might be coming through you from another origin, and it's not your place to know which answers were yours and which were His.

Arlen quoted the line about how "Hell is other people," but actually found the opposite was true. Divinity and Heaven and Happiness and Peace Of Mind aren't God conveniently vocalizing answers to your questions. Maybe you only find those things by engaging with the world--with the people--around you.