A review of "First Reformed," by Stephen Abbott
MILD SPOILERS - BUT NOT AS MANY AS ARE IN THE TRAILER!
Director Paul Schrader (who wrote the screenplays for “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” and “Last Temptation of Christ”) writes and directs “First Reformed,” the melancholy tale of Rev. Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) who lives an almost solitary life in a dying church in upstate New York. As he deals with great personal loss, and a loss of faith, his anguish bursts forth into ever-deepening despair.
While the film is already being discussed as an Oscar contender, and it has well-known stars - Cedric “the Entertainer” as a fundamentalist megachurch minister, Amanda Seyfried (“Mamma Mia”, “Veronica Mars,” “Big Love”) and Michael Gaston (“The Mentalist,” “Mad Men”) - it looks more like the Indie film it really is, with a lot of “mood-setting” and scenes that appear ad-libbed, but sadly, probably weren’t.
The long opening foreshadows Toller’s despair, featuring credits in an old-fashioned font, a long shot of the white wood-clad “First Reformed Church,” and overcast skies filled with snow seemingly about to burst forth from the clouds.
The mood, and the script, is assisted by Schrader’s Calvinist upbringing, and as a clergyman in the Reformed church in the film, Pastor Toller would be well acquainted with the dour view of human nature I think plays a part in his unraveling.
The story opens in the church, where Hawke’s Toller is going through the motions. The nearly-dead church is a 250-year-old relic about to be “re-consecrated” in a ceremony run by the building’s owners, a large fundamentalist megachurch down the street run by Cedric (Pastor Jeffers) who has brought Toller in to manage the church after Toller, a former military chaplain, suffered a tragedy and a divorce that’s sent him on a downward spiral of despair.
Toller has begun to write a year-long diary, a “form of prayer” he narrates for us throughout the film. This helps us focus on his mindset, and Schrader was right to include it, at the risk of accusations that he is plagiarizing earlier films using the same trope, because it's effective here.
The sparsely-attended, broken down Dutch Reformed Church – owned by, and serving as an appendage of, the megachurch down the road - serves as a painful and true-to-life reminder of many mainline churches that can’t keep their doors open due to dwindling membersship. Again, Schrader nails this, because he likely lived it, first-hand, and I believe there’s no way this portrayal is accidental.
That even Toller can no longer bring himself to pray to God, and is losing faith in his bleak theology, is painfully portrayed in every frame of the film. It’s a crisis of faith in slow motion.
Toller offers to visit the fiancé of a parishioner who’s worried about her partner’s state of mind. The woman, Mary, is pregnant by the man, Michael (thank God, the character is not named Joseph!) before they have been married, but presumably after consummation.
Mary is disturbed by Michael’s growing environmental extremism. They meet, and Michael tells Toller of his obsession with the future of the planet, which he believes is doomed due to mankind’s destruction of the environment, a view encouraged when he looks up gloomy stats on websites and is reinforced by the photos of starving polar bears on the wall. He admits coyly to pressuring Mary to have an abortion, because he fears bringing a child into such a world.
Toller unconvincingly (and we know this, because of later events) encourages Michael not to give up on humanity, though his narration betrays his inner torment.
We see that Toller is the one convinced, however – rather quickly – to take up Michael’s cause. And, after Michael is out of the picture (I’ll hide much of what’s to come from this point on) he toys with doing so in a rather radical way.
I’ll add here that as a mainline preacher, he would likely have already shared much of Michael’s environmental worldview, though it’s portrayed here as a new revelation, with Toller poring over conspiracy theory websites and papers, featuring ever more dire discoveries.
But scary rhetoric about a bleak future can backfire badly, and the film, perhaps unintentionally, shows that fear-based, alarmists tactics can lead to paranoia and extremism, rather than hope. Clearly, not what Schrader had in mind.
If there’s a religious subtext in the film, unintentional or not, it’s that mainline Christianity has, in some cases, substituted environmental activism in place of its negative theological worldview. In a real Reformed church, Michael would have been invited by Toller to teach a class or lead a church-wide protest march. But that would likely have saved Michael, and perhaps even have helped redeem Toller – an ending too positive for this film’s protagonist, and its theme.
Instead, the film’s third act is its most bleak, and most soul-crushing. The pace noticeably quickens, as Toller’s life unravels before our eyes, and his religious doubt turns to clarity in his new mission.
A fantasy "flying" scene at this point takes all reality out of the film, however, and reminds us that, “Yes, this is an Indie film.” It's a shame Schrader did this, just because he could. It adds little, and sacrifices much.
An all-too-convenient villain appears, which gives Toller the idea to perhaps become a martyr to his new environmental cause. But at the last minute, his plan changes, and in anguish, he graphically, pathetically, wraps himself in a mere symbol of martyrdom.
The film could have ended several different ways, and the ending Schrader chose is extremely hard to watch. He would have been forgiven for ending it with a fulfilled mission for Toller, perhaps with him first calling away the person he wished to save.
Or, if he had chosen to be heavy-handed, he could have had Toller resign, and announce that he’d spend the rest of his days fighting pollution. Instead, the “Sopranos-like” ending leaves audiences adrift, though the film really may have ended 30 seconds before it actually did.
My theory is that the "cup" did not pass from him, and the very last moments are a dream sequence. You’ll see what I mean.
