“For you, every hour is the darkest hour,” Pastor Jeffers tells Reverend Ernst Toller during the latter’s darkest hour. A forty-six-year-old divorcée whose son died in Iraq, Toller (Ethan Hawke) has in essence found sanctuary at the eponymous church built before the American Revolution in Snowbridge, New York. At day he delivers sermons and gives tours (always remembering to hawk souvenir items); at night he pours his conventionally tormented thoughts, seeped in Thomas Merton and whiskey, into a moleskin notebook written. Paul Schrader’s film chronicles how a lifetime of fragile psychological resources crumbles in the face of despair and avarice.
Indeed, the first shot in First Reformed establishes the preeminence of the church as character and symbol: as the credits roll, the Dutch Colonial church gets closer until it fills the screen. To learn that the author of Transcendental style in film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer has written and directed a film about a New York pastor in a crisis of faith is like learning that Woody Allen will release another film before December. First Reformed marks the return of Schrader, an artist of staggering unevenness thanks to a couple of phenomenon: although his reach has exceeded his grasp, the reach should often have been left unreachable. Riven with contradictory impulses, his movies sometimes curdle into the incoherent if not puerile. Yet Blue Collar, American Gigolo, Patty Hearst, Light Sleeper, and Affliction remain essential to understanding American film in the late twentieth century, and I’m not even mentioning the films he’s written for Martin Scorsese like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Even these films have their problems – they’re helpless about women, for one, stressing how women create or exacerbate the sweat-covered macho despair. But they’re unique in the American canon for at least attempting to engage with the effect of political actions on our souls.
Triggering the slow collapse of Toller is, at the insistence of parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried), his encounter with her husband Matt (Philip Ettinger), a burly sort who has joined a radical environmental organization that espouses violence. In a ten-minute dialogue – a dialogue in the true sense of the word, in which subject and interlocutor speak and listen to each other’s ideas – Toller counsels Matt to avoid despair, to at least try to love his pregnant wife. Physician, heal thyself is the obvious conclusion; with every maxim Toller’s facial muscles seem to collapse a little more. Schrader uses every technique he’s learned from a lifetime of studying the classics: low-angle shots, closeups, medium shots. What emerges is a scene indebted to Ingmar Bergman but driven by a particularly American angst and self-torment.
Schrader has said Bergman’s Winter Light was an obvious influence on First Reformed. So is Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, in which the protagonist confesses, pun intended, in voice-over that the journal he assiduously keeps is, to quote Hawke’s Toller, a “form of speaking.” When Toller learns that First Reformed’s biggest donors – responsible for an anniversary party that even the governor will attend – heads a manufacturing plant that’s one of America’s worst polluters, he is galvanized. He learns that it’s easier to quote from the New Testament than to use the words of Christ and Paul for social justice.
When Hawke entered his thirties, his features took on the appearance of a reptile that had resorted to cannibalism; in Hawke’s case he had swallowed earlier roles like his slacker in Reality Bites or his big goofy dim American romantic in Before Sunrise. Positioning himself as a mutli-genre threat, the novelist and stage actor accepted roles that varied wildly in quality (Training Day, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) but took advantage of his maturation. He was at his best playing besieged manhood: think Gattaca (1997), Tape (2001), and, best, Boyhood (2014). His cheeks assumed a lupine sleekness, and his voice rumbled its mix of half tones as if in the grip of a permanent head cold. As Toller, Hawke does some of his most effective screen work. Schrader’s allusive dialogue doesn’t trip Hawke up; he weighs his line carefully, lovingly, and when Schrader rewards him with a close-up he’s a beautiful, severe camera object. Kudos also to Cedric Kyles, better known as Cedric the Entertainer, who as Jeffers manages in his final conversation with Toller to be at once warm, sanctimonious, and sinister.
I’ve read more than one article since my screening a few days ago explaining what happens in the last act, which contains developments that should surprise no one familiar with Schrader and his weakness for self-flagellation. To me, he backs away from answering the political questions he raises; the apocalyptic choice is a way of abjuring a responsibility to the world. Bleakness can be a kind of sentimentality: a naturalism that insists we can’t wriggle free from the pitiless hand of fate, therefore why try? Using biographical explanations don’t help: Marilynne Robinson has taught us that Calvinism wasn’t all hellfire. Schrader likes the way hair shirts look on his characters. At the end of First Reformed, he wants Gethsemane and Paradise. Thankfully, in Hawke’s performance, Schrader fuses both.
GRADE: B+
Humanizing The Vacuum 