FIRST REFORMED C+
USA (113 mi) 2017 d:
Paul Schrader
Loneliness has
followed me my whole life — everywhere — in bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores —
everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.
—Travis Bickle from Taxi
Driver (1976), written by Paul Schrader
A crisis in faith film, made for people who feel suffocated
by an overly repressive church, who prefer, like writer/director Paul Schrader,
a tortuous existence, with suffering a stand-in for religious commitment, as if
it could wipe away the sins of the world.
Associated with Scorsese as a screenwriter in films like Taxi
Driver (1976), RAGING BULL (1980), and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST
(1988), Schrader grew up attending the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church,
never seeing a film until he was in his late teens, early on training to become
a minister, where it is significant that roughly three out of 10 Protestant
leaders describe their church as “Calvinist or Reformed,” a proportion
statistically unchanged from a decade earlier (according to a 2010 Barna poll, So
there is no NeoReformed/New Calvinist movement - Patheos). The Christian Reformed Church is the American
embodiment of the original 16th century reformation movement that became
necessary as the Catholic Church spawned corruption and failed to respond to
its parishioners, examples being widespread corruption among the Catholic
clergy, especially at the top, the practice of torturing people suspected of
holding non-orthodox beliefs until they confessed or died, encouraging
parishioners to pray to Mary and to the saints (instead of Jesus Christ), also
church sales pitches, including fake letters from the Pope, that promised
heavenly redemption once money was received.
While popular in the Netherlands and Germany, later an American version
arose, becoming the Christian Reformed Church (currently 300,000 members in the
United States and Canada). While
narratively modeled after Bresson’s Diary
of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951) and Bergman’s
WINTER LIGHT (1963), the film lacks the sparseness and transcendent poetry,
bearing more of a resemblance to Bruno Dumont’s 2010
Top Ten Films of the Year: #5 Hadewijch, as it tries to be a modern
parable, complete with contemporary themes, but all in all, it’s overly
fatalistic, bearing a gloominess that resembles the tortuous anguish of
Scorcese’s Silence
(2016). Ethan Hawke plays Reverend
Toller, a pastor with a dwindling congregation at an old Protestant New England
parish that’s been around since 1767, part of the Underground Railway, whose
historical significance is diminished by being a subsidiary of a much larger
modern megachurch. Leading a solitary
existence, giving little thought to his own health or well-being, the film is a
morose tale of a despondent priest who grapples with his own existential
malaise, himself a former military chaplain, having lost a son in the Iraq War
that destroyed his marriage, his road to redemption lies in service to others
by practicing his faith, though he’s constantly challenged at every turn,
recorded in his yearlong diary, where his bleak inner narration provides the
outline of the story, basically a reflection of God’s silence expressed through
acute self-loathing, describing an “all-consuming knowledge of the emptiness of
all things.”
One of the aspects of neo-Calvinism is a youthful trend of
fiery rhetoric that seems rooted by the insular nature of college universities,
like think tanks, which have a way of consolidating like-minded thinking, but
remain isolated, protecting their inner core while combatting or even
condemning outsiders. This film seems
dedicated to the idea of opening up the church to deeply rooted modern era
problems that affect us all but seemingly have no answers, which includes
ecological nightmare predictions as well as the influence of money in serving
the church’s social mission, as the church is often connected to powerful
technological interests that may be creating many of the toxic hazards that
could diminish or deteriorate any future quality of life. The church tends to reflect a status quo
position, seemingly above the fray, yet may privately be partnering with some
of the biggest offenders of toxic waste.
Reverend Toller gets involved in the life of a young married couple at
the behest of an ardent believer, Mary (Amanda Seyfried, actually pregnant
during the shoot), who is worried about the deteriorating mental state of her
non-believing husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an avowed radical
environmentalist who has been arrested, preventing him from continuing to help
the cause, losing his faith in the apathy surrounding global consciousness, as
there’s little interest in saving the planet, creating nightmare scenarios that
he’s all too familiar with, struggling with the notion of losing all hope. While Reverend Toller makes a genuine attempt
to counsel a lost soul, laying the foundation of the internal struggle, “Wisdom
is holding two contradictory truths in our mind at the same time: hope and
despair,” suggesting despair exists so that God’s hope is that much more
meaningful, where overcoming doubt is the real struggle, yet he is himself
facing a losing battle with his own inner torment, drinking heavily while
eating sparingly, weakened by his own self-inflicted choices, yet carries on to
face a new day with revived spiritual interest, as he identifies with Michael’s
predicament, himself something of a black sheep among the flock of the devoted,
where the parent church, run by Pastor Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer),
couldn’t be more financially successful, viewed throughout the community as a
pillar of society. Exploring the darker
regions of society may come naturally for Toller, as he has his own unique
familiarity, yet he’s equally as troubled himself, even as he offers guidance
and counsel.
The scenes between Toller and Michael form the inner core of
the pastor’s dilemma, with Michael asking, “Can God forgive us for what we’ve
done to this world?” While this question
reverberates and echoes throughout the rest of the film, their conversation is
intriguing but pales in comparison with Steve McQueen’s HUNGER (2008), for
instance, a thoroughly complex film that at its center becomes a twenty-minute
uninterrupted dramatic scene contemplating the 1981 Irish hunger strike between prison
inmate IRA activist Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest arguing the life and
death moral implications. That is a
thoroughly riveting first rate drama, while here, perhaps the most surprising
scene is a moment of stark cruelty that occurs out of nowhere (there were
audible gasps in the audience) between a former husband and wife, with Toller
demeaning and humiliating his ex-wife Esther (Victoria Hill) for expressing an
interest in his well-being, egotistic actions that undermine all else, calling
into question any other motivations he may have. In other words, what good is it to find
forgiveness with God if you can’t forgive your wife? She’s a member of his flock that needs
shepherding as well. To utterly give up
on her equates him with spewing toxic venom, a parallel with the oil and
chemical manufacturers who think only of themselves and their own self-term
interests and financial gain, all but ignoring the long-term needs of the
planet. The whole thing feels like a
moralist trap, a test of absolutism, vying off to explore just a single branch
on the tree of sin, yet becoming consumed by the ramifications, clouded by
errant judgment, never really seeing the forest through the trees, arguably
accepting martyrism as a way out (more short-term speculation), which in the
full scope of things only diminishes the overall impact, leaving more to be
done by future generations to clean up the mess you left behind. While Toller’s plan of action remains initially
ambiguous, where rational thought turns metaphysical and surreal, with doubts
swirling around his head, moving from one possibility to another, with
lingering afterthoughts, yet the final implications are clear, whiffing in his
moment of truth, coming up empty, ultimately drowning in his own self-pity,
lost in the vacuousness of an ethical collapse.
While it’s commendable taking a moral interest in difficult and
all-encompassing social positions, similar to Father Daniel Berrigan, a
Catholic priest who worked actively in the 60’s against the Vietnam War,
putting him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list (eventually serving two years in prison), the first
priest to make the list, yet this film never rises to that level of
plausibility, as few American priests ever put themselves on the line like that
(unlike the many Baptist pastors in the Civil Rights movement), where the moral
convictions would have to be more than mere speculation. The idea of equating radical environmental
activism with extreme religious conviction seems misguided, having more in
common with martyrdom and Islamic jihadism along with other radical misadventures
that when put into action would only destabilize a polarized public, where
democracy requires convincing an otherwise disinterested public about the
merits of your argument. While this film
portrays a wayward priest’s struggle with faith and moral servitude, the chosen
path convinces no one, basically betraying his own calling, becoming instead an
off-the-rails horror story, with the finale set to a raw and bare-bones
rendition (sung by Esther) of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,”
chillingly recalled being sung by Robert Mitchum as the phony predator priest
in The
Night of the Hunter (1955).
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