We all want to be part of a society that offers second chances and provides opportunities to individuals seeking redemption.
Whether it is through religion, family, race, credo or background, all of these individuals sought redemption from feeling as if they were the heroes.
The film's ancillary theme is that even the most evil individuals can find redemption through acts of resistance to tyranny.
It's a loaded question, since the author has made individual (and perhaps national) redemption his central theme, even to the whimsical point of extending it to a serial killer known as Beaver Cleaver, who has shifted his pattern of butchery.
Modern Americans are great gourmandizers of therapy, and if we still shy away from the pity and terror that Aristotle identified as the cleansing emotions of tragedy, we are, perhaps more than ever, eager for the individual healing and collective redemption that he understood to be their outcome.
Anselm rejected the view that humanity, through its sin, owes a debt to the Devil and placed the essence of redemption in individual union with Christ in the Eucharist (Lord's Supper), to which the sacrament of baptism (by which a person is incorporated into the church) opens the way.
He was subtly bringing back his favorite argument that more humane prisons would make the community safer but rather than talking about recidivism or selfishness, he spoke of individual dramas of human redemption.
The violence in most movies today — New Line slasher flicks and Miramax art-house fare alike — doesn't pretend to be a study in the redemption of individuals.
This near-silent story of the slow re-humanization, the redemption of individuals which we call marginalized takes place in a shanty that could be anywhere, and happens to be on the edges of Turin, Italy, which is perhaps fitting, given that city's famous shroud with its ghostly imprint, and the absolutely beautiful final scene in which two street urchins riding on a bus seem to disappear.
