First Reformed

The mind, heart, and soul of Paul Schrader has blessed us with a rawness about faith that isn't seen in too many other corners of the cinema world.  The writer/director has thus taken us inside tragic figures such as TAXI DRIVER's Travis Bickle and unblinkingly observed their observations of a decaying landscape.  A once beautiful place destroyed my mankind.  Souls filled with corruption and easy justification for their actions.  When Reverend Toller questions another pastor about why the latter sees no conflict with accepting endowments from an industrialist known for his company's rampant pollution of the environment, his role in destroying Earth, the pastor flippantly replies that "(God's) done it before".

Ernst Toller understands longsuffering.  At least outwardly.  His facade of patience and empathy masks private agony and doubt.  He nightly scribbles his thoughts longhand into a journal, intending the project to last a year before burning it.  What wisdom will he have gained at the end? Will be still be around to dispatch his pained words? As part of Ethan Hawke's stunning performance, we hear some of those words in voiceover, forgetting that this actor has often played smart alecky and jaded Gen-Exers.  Here, he too is jaded, but beaten down by the death of his son and failed marriage.  Stomach problems.  A church with what seems only a half dozen parishioners.  A church mockingly referred to as "an antique shop" by those at Abundant Life, the megachurch up the road.  The church that nonetheless subsidizes the centuries old First Reformed, once a stop on the famous Underground Railroad.

Ernst has resigned himself to a monk's existence of sorts, repeatedly rebuffing the interest of Esther (Victoria Hill) a choir director at Abundant Life who attends services as First Reformed.  He's quite bitter and even hostile toward her, resentful of a love offering of any sort.  It occurred to me that maybe he also despises her for having her foot in both congregations.  A sort of lukewarmness, or may even counterfeit presence at his church as her only motive for attendance is her interest in him.

When a distraught young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) seeks Toller's counseling regarding her troubled husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an angry environmentalist whose fervency toward his cause does not mirror that of the reverend, the latter will be challenged and possibly renewed.  Seek a long lost fire.  A long path that may have a beacon at its apex, but what a journey to it.

FIRST REFORMED is one of the best examinations of spiritual crisis I've seen.  Schrader is clearly influenced by Bresson and Dreyer, and his take is no less urgent.  But likewise mostly quiet.   I was impressed by his restraint and unwillingness to take cheap shots at the church or its congregants.  Especially gargantuan houses of worship like Abundant Life, which look and feel like consumer friendly enclaves that offer smooth bromides and sometimes espouse the prosperity gospel.  As a friend stated, they have their purpose. The director is not offering a satire but a mature, serious treatise on the impossibility of faith.

But also Man's failure as a steward of the Earth.  A reconciliation of theology and science.  Again, Schrader does not lay a heavy hand with his concerns, here for the environment.  To him, and to any thinking, reasonable Christian, it is a natural outgrowth of love for God.  Obedience to His word.  This film has a finale you won't soon forget.  This is a remarkable film.