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First Reformed

12/11/2018

4 Comments

 

A-
3.72

A depressed priest finds an outlet in doomsday environmentalism.

Directed by Paul Schrader
Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, and Cedric the Entertainer
​Initial Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
If a theme had to be forced onto the films that just happen to have been released in 2018, despair comes to mind.  It’s been present in works ranging from arthouse indies like Eighth Grade and You Were Never Really Here to the big-budget spectacles of Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2.  Nowhere is despair more prevalent than in Paul Schrader’s haunting First Reformed, where all forms and all scales of dread are encapsulated by another of Schrader’s ‘god’s lonely men.’  Calling to mind the spare, religious-inflected introspection of mid-century masters like Robert Bresson, First Reformed is a bleak rebuke of hope and a dense treatise in search of it.

Ethan Hawke stars as Father Ernst Toller, the minister of the venerable First Reformed church of Stollbridge, NY.  His austere message of sacrifice, delivered plainly and dispassionately, is dwarfed by the affirming gospel of the nearby megachurch, led by Toller’s colleague Father Jeffers (Cedric Kyles).  The First Reformed church’s increasingly empty pews prod Toller towards a belief that he’s a failure marking time, and his attempted remedy is to write a journal, thus clarifying his thoughts and maybe finding a way forward.  This is complicated by pregnant new parishioner Mary Mansana (Amanda Seyfried) who comes to Toller looking for guidance for her despondent husband Michael (Phillip Ettinger).  Toller visits the Mansana’s home and meets Michael, an environmental activist who has given up the planet’s ghost in the face of climate change and the earthshaking disruption it will bring within his lifetime.  Toller sympathizes with Michael’s arguments while also pitching hope in the face of fear, but events conspire to push Toller towards Michael’s point of view.

​In Schrader’s most iconic work, Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle’s voiceover put the viewer inside his fractured mind.  Decades later, Schrader uses Toller’s journal to do the same, but this is just the immersive starting point.  Alexander Dynan’s cinematography is in a compressed Academy ratio, the black bars of the screen squeezing the characters beyond their already claustrophobic states.  The film also conveys a sense of impending doom around the church’s big anniversary, a dreaded event that Toller can barely tolerate and a small-scale equivalent of crisis points brought on by rising temperatures.  Schrader is a master of mood.  He creates a world where nothing is going to get better, where moral compromises accumulate into piles of toxic sludge, where even aesthetic pleasure is a near-impossibility.  Michael makes a prophecy of environmental collapse, but it’s difficult to imagine a more pervasively pessimistic world than the one that already exists in the film.

At this moment in history, a cinematic statement resigned to degradation and collapse isn’t only imaginable, it’s preaching to the left-leaning choir who are most likely to find their way to an indie character study.  In Toller, Schrader finds a mirror for the state of the planet, afflicting him with stomach pains that may or may not be cancer, an illness that may or may not have been brought on by the contaminated waterways of upstate New York.  One of those contaminators, malignant industrialist Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), is set to play a big part at the anniversary celebration, forcing Toller to share the stage with a man whose life’s work is the antithesis of what he views his own to be.  Balq is a sour figure in First Reformed, the embodiment of willful blindness that celebrates a rosy past and ignores the future.  His wealth is not enough for his ego; he must also be praised in public at every opportunity by people with supposed moral heft, a polluter who wants credit for installing recycling bins in his facilities.  He’s the kind of billionaire who’s actively working towards environmental disaster while pricing out missile silos to live in when everything goes south.

The business-led scourging of the earth is not enough for Schrader.  He also has choice words for the specific kind of religion practiced by Jeffers.  It’s possible that Toller’s dourness is simply not what people want to hear in a marketplace of ideas, and Jeffers’ affirming brand genuinely fills the seats.  Therefore, the vast differences in their congregation and their churches are people making up their minds on where they want to be every Sunday.  That charitable stance is not where First Reformed is placing its nickel.  Where Toller challenges Balq, Jeffers recognizes him as a vital source of patronage.  I doubt that Schrader is a religious man, but it’s clear that if he was, his vision of the role of religion is that of a counterweight to raw power, not a reinforcer.  Toller is enacting a Christ-like vision when he refuses to comfort the comfortable or when he doesn’t preach the opiate of Jesus wanting his followers to be wealthy.  It’s no accident that telling people what they want to hear is shown to result in a megachurch with a full cafeteria and luxurious seats and complacent, credulous members.

For as potent and righteous as a polemic against conservative forces like corporations and religion would be, Schrader has higher-minded aims than the cinematic equivalent of a Think Progress screed.  While Balq is given no respite, Jeffers communicates the film’s most profound theme.  He reminds Toller that Jesus didn’t spend all his time in the garden of Gethsamane, lamenting his coming death.  He eventually got off his knees and went out into the streets and the market, translating his despair into something more productive.  If Toller had never met Mary, he would’ve just found something else to wallow in.  First Reformed knows how easy pessimism is, how little effort it takes to lament the species and throw one’s hands up at their collective uselessness.  What’s hard is to know it and continue on, maybe chipping away at some ignorance or callousness but not shrinking from the effort.  Michael is shown to be paralyzed by his fears, contemplating taking action but too sure of how little impact he’ll ultimately have.  Balq doesn’t have that trepidation, and he’ll continue to bring his visions into reality if those that oppose him are equally paralyzed.

The role of Ernst Toller is in the running for Ethan Hawke’s most affecting role, a highlight of a career that contains plenty of competition.  His go-to move here comes whenever Toller is waiting out a conversation, as Hawke looks into the middle distance and nods and fibs and prods things to a place where he can escape.  It’s an encapsulation of his deeper issues, a refusal to tolerate anything that isn’t exactly what he wants to do in a single facial expression.  When he isn’t pursing his lips in polite frustration, Toller is seething with indignation at nearly everyone, including himself.  The Mansana’s are something of an island for him.  Michael is an intellectual challenge, and their big discussion, despite the gravity of their subject, is invigorating for the viewer and for Toller.  Mary is an emotional challenge.  The slightly-idealized character is played by Seyfried as a font of warmth, such that if Toller can’t appreciate her, then he’s too far gone.

One of my favorite films of the decade is John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary, another character study of a man of the cloth trying and failing to shepherd his flock.  These kinds of films that question the role of religion in a world that’s leaving it behind are intensely interesting, and another of its kind joins Calvary on the list of the decade’s best films.  First Reformed is a titanic work from one of modern cinema’s progenitors, as relevant to future audiences as Taxi Driver is to modern ones.  I’d get out of the garden and into the market for First Reformed, gladly evangelizing for its dark charms and heady themes.  A

4 Comments
Lane
12/11/2018 02:34:05 am

“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” – Julian of Norwich

Julian was referencing the Trinity and, I’m told, the modern English translation doesn’t really do
the quote justice. She was referencing the Trinity, and the way all things—people,
relationships, creation—are ultimately a part of a larger divine narrative into which all things
come together
for the good. It’s also how you know nobody important is going to die at the end of this film. As the good Pastor Jeffers quotes from Romans 8, creation is, indeed, groaning. Though if we think it’s groaning so that we can get our fill of oil and plastics and the charitable donations of those that profit from it, I’m afraid he may be referencing a different kind of groaning.

Rev. Toller refers to Julian of Norwich in the film’s first diary entry, though you might not catch it if you don’t have a religious studies degree, medieval literature degree, or seriously intense Catholic mysticism catechesis. That’s not judgment on you, dear reader—judgment, and the misuse of it, is what the film is largely about—instead it shows the layers and layers this film offers to those that want to peel them back. Note: the picture of the hand holding the hazelnut was also a Julian reference. Also, Julian was the Saint that had super bloody visions of Christ speaking to her and decided that it was better to wash our sins in blood than water. Think about that as you re-watch the final sequence. Many layers.

There are a few films that just kick you in the gut. Because it’s about things you once took for granted and no longer do. Because they remind you of situations where you once failed someone. Because they predict what will be and what might be with such an intense light you can’t help but feel partially blinded. This is what “First Reformed” was and I don’t project that experience onto anyone else. Of course, the topic matters to me, but the humanity matters to me more.

“First Reformed” hangs on an essential binary: hope/despair. It’s referenced throughout the film and is the nail upon which each characters’ arc hangs (note how the camera shifts up or down on close-up shots depending on if the character is judged or pure; hopeful or desperate; evil or good). Each character is confronted with the essential question we all must face at some point: will all things be well?

I wonder how the members of the MMC would answer this? Yes, it seems our planet will overheat by 2050 and things might turn to chaos. Yet, we have two pastors; a handful of teachers; a few that have just welcomed newborns into the world or committed to long-term relationships. It seems that an MMC brood could soon start their own competing club against their parents in just a few years. It seems our group would, on the whole, seem to be a hopeful bunch based on careers, relationships, and procreativity.

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Lane
12/11/2018 02:34:50 am

But we also live in a world of despair. I regularly watch cable news, not because I need it to keep informed—I subscribe to a newspaper and have easy access to multiple news sources—but because I like the despair. I just like it. I bet you do too. Maybe not cable news exactly, but somebody here likes true-crime podcasts…or “Making a Murderer”…or “NCIS”…or had a Marilyn Manson phase in high school. Psychoanalysis calls it the “Thanatos” which is just a fancy word for death-drive. We watch cable-news for the same reason we go on roller coasters or watch horror movies…we’re fascinated with the end. It’s despair, and we’re always in its grips no matter how high our dose of Lexapro gets. It’s a human question we all ask: “How well will things be?”

“First Reformed” tries to answer this by giving an artistic non-answer. Ethan Hawke’s Rev. Tolliver is one of the most psychologically deep characters I’ve experienced outside of novels. (Prediction on the internet so it can’t be taken back…Hawke will get a Best Actor Oscar nod this year, though I won’t predict if he’ll win). Amanda Seyfried’s performance is slightly uneven, but when it’s good she completely disappears into that character. I hope Cedric “The Entertainer” Kyle gets a few awards nods as well.

But awards shouldn’t define performances or the layers that make those performances work. Shrader’s filmmaking here is, simply, incredible. Textures and props aren’t something that usually make it into our reviews, yet they are worth a second look if you missed them the first time. The way squares and beiges make up the frames of Abundant Life. The way characters in the final sequences are dressed…the pure (Esther) in beige against the evil (Balq) in black; those in purgatory in some sort of mid-hue blue (Jeffers). Tolliver becomes redeemed in white, yet ends in a pure cassock stained in blood (biblical? I think so). Did you note how Hawke and Seyfried were framed by an eye and lamp while commencing with intimate conversation and prayer? Think those have meaning? These are the details (and there are about 1,000 of them) that make this film worth viewing many times if you can stomach it.

Shrader’s writing and filmmaking is meticulous. He gets, first, the extreme introspection of the Reformed Christian tradition (of which Augustine is the hero). Luther started things out and Calvin took it to its RedBull-fueled conclusion of predestination. Max Weber’s analysis of the Reformed tradition in the early twentieth century was that the Reformed can’t really figure out if they’re saved, so they just work for it. Or, maybe, they give tours of historical sites for it. While the Reformation rejected Catholicism, there was always an uneasy respect between the masochistic elements. The Pietists of Germany picked this up in an especially bloody way. I’d dare Catholics to compare their visions of brutalized saints and Jesus with the Moravians and see who comes out the worse.

There’s so much to say about bodies in this film that I don’t even have the intellectual space to really get it; like the way religious people can torture or deprive their bodies the closer they get to the divine or to the pain that is caused by separation from the divine. This isn’t new stuff. This goes back to the Old Testament and has probably been most fully explored theologically with Augustine’s “Confessions” in the fifth century. But Merton’s “Seven Storey Mountain” is an essential modern depiction of this impulse referenced a few times in “FR” and rejected by Jeffers’s character. Too bad, because Merton’s book has lasted longer than a few megachurches. Makes you consider eternity.

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Lane
12/11/2018 02:35:51 am

Which leads to the great modern question of pragmatic faith: is religion here to sustain you and make you feel better or is religion here to call you to something much more painful, yet redeeming? Are you Team Tolliver or Team Jeffers?

I can’t answer that question, and thankfully neither does the film. I’m sure Hollywood notes (were Schrader a studio director) would have had Tolliver blowing up the whole sanctuary, just as other notes probably had him leaving the Church yard to run away with Seyfried’s character before any of the real torture could commence. While both of those endings might have been satisfying, they wouldn’t have been true.

In his first conversation with Michael, Rev. Tolliver references that the conversation felt like Jacob wrestling with God. The reference suggested that he felt more alive in his ministry than ever before. Of course, in that story Jacob came away with a broken leg…but he also came away with the covenant. There’s a brokenness that follows Rev. Tolliver just like there’s a brokenness that follows all of us. But the movie suggests there’s promise. In the Bible story, Jacob had a son…Joseph (also the name of Tolliver’s child)…who, yes, happened to be beat up and thrown in a well and all that…but who was also a dreamer. And a savior.

Will all things be well? Beats me. Rationally speaking, no. Seems we’ll burn up and it’s rather illogical for me to be planning for a kid anytime soon. But none of us make purely rational decisions. And the world doesn’t always, maybe not even often, work out in rational ways. If “First Reformed” is right, then there’s a big blank space between what should actually happen and what will be. And yet, all manner of things might be well.

Grade: A+

Bryan
12/11/2018 09:49:46 am

Jon - the 4:3 ratio (or whatever it was) was not a good choice. I spent 10 minutes changing the settings and resetting y TV, streaming device, and app only to look on Wikipedia that the director did not choose the standard 16:9 or 21:9. The beauty of the old charge and the enormity of the megachurch was lost a bit.

Lane - Will all things be well? They'll be the same, probably. The best predictor of tomorrow is today. The environment has been going to shit for a long time, at this point I'm not sure what to do besides minimize waste and vote. I convinced my church to ditch styrofoam cups in favor of the mugs just sitting in the cabinet, I drive a high MPG Honda Civic, and I don't spray my yard with chemicals - on a personal level I'm not sure what else to do.

We can only hope to raise a generation that will overturn the corporatocracy that is currently running this country. It's hard not to think we've passed peak-USA and China's rising economy will dominate the world. Maybe, just maybe they'll stop making all the junk littering our stores. I say all this, but what of this has changed in the last 40, 50, 60 years?

My initial grade was a B+/A-, but I feel like a rewatch is necessary. Something to really put me in the Christmas spirit.

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