His touchstones are unmistakable—the apocalyptic
anxieties of Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963); the
self-interrogations of a dying clergyman in Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951). Yet far from mere pastiche, Paul Schrader's First Reformed uses these works as touchstones to carve out a new vision of a
man of God weathering their Dark Night of the Soul. Mired in the same
austere Calvinism of Schrader's youth, Pastor Toller (Ethan Hawke) wiles
away his days maintaining the dying congregation of a dying historical
church in upstate New York. Little more than a glorified tourist trap
complete with gift shop—in addition to being the earliest extant
Protestant church in the area, it also served as a stop on the
Underground Railroad—the congregation only survives thanks to the
support of a nearby superchurch bursting with corporate donations. It
was only through the efforts of their avuncular leader and media star
Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyles) that the depressed Toller was able to get
the job following a breakdown spurred by his son's death in Iraq and the
disintegration of his marriage.
The stultifying sameness
of his daily routine—clean the grounds, give the tours, lead the
service; drink the whisky, keep the diary, confront the emptiness—gets
interrupted when one of his congregants, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), asks
him to counsel her disturbed husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), a
radical environmentalist recently arrested in Canada for violent
demonstrations. Believing the earth doomed, Michael's nihilistic
hopelessness infects the psychologically weakened Toller, eventually
shunting him down the same extremist route. Toller becomes more and more
obsessed with the environmental corruption around him, both literally
and figuratively: he starts wondering aloud to whoever will listen
whether God will forgive mankind for spoiling his creation; he begins
planning violent retribution against Jeffers' corporate sponsors, a
manufacturer of fertilizers accused by the government as one of
the worst polluters in the world, who plan on attending his church's
upcoming 250th anniversary and reconsecration. The environmentalism is
merely a front for Toller's melt-down—one could easily see him cracking
under the pressures of atomic holocaust during the Cold War or the
threat of Nazi domination in World War Two. What matters is the movement
gives his despair a tangible outlet, one that almost sanctifies his
need for self-destruction as his body slowly succumbs to a cancer he
refuses to treat and an alcoholism he chooses to embrace
(a scene of him pouring Pepto-Bismol "for his stomach" into a massive
glass of whisky made my audience squirm more than any of the film's
brief moments of grisly violence).
And yet Schrader—the
patron saint of self-destructive macho protagonists—refuses to give
Toller an easy out, rejecting the violent third act catharses dominating
so many of his films, choosing absolution rather than annihilation. The
ending is practically a refutation of many of his earlier films,
particularly his screenplay for Martin Scorsese's
Taxi Driver (1976), in
its depiction of love as a force for salvation, not as a motivator for
vengeance. In this way
First Reformed is practically the most Christian
of Schrader's films. In fact, it's perhaps the most intelligent
examination of faith in recent American cinema. Here is a film where
religious devotion is treated not as a phenomenon inspired by moral or
political zealotry/ignorance, but as a deep-seated conviction tempered
by thought and reason. (True, political zealotry infects Toller, but
ultimately it's a combination of Eros and religious agape that rescues
him.) One of the best sequences in the film is the first meeting between
Toller and Michael where, despite the latter being an unbeliever, the
two have a dignified and revealing discussion on the religious basis for
hope in the face of despair. At no point does Michael sneer at Toller
and ask how he can possibly believe in an invisible magic man in the
sky. In this age of increased skepticism and insulated Christian markets
distributing theologically suspect pap (see the
God's Not Dead
franchise), this is exactly the kind of discourse American cinema
desperately needs.
Rating: 9/10
