Yet in the moment I deliver that unstinting endorsement,
I feel compelled to add that this is a very special film for a certain,
inevitably rather limited audience. In line with other Schrader movies,
but perhaps more so than any, it defines itself against many of the central assumptions and conventions of most mainstream moviemaking.
First Reformed (2017)
A former military chaplain is wracked by grief over
the death of his son. Mary is a member of his church whose husband, a
radical environmentalist, commits suicide, setting the plot in motion.
Director:
Paul SchraderWriter:
Paul SchraderStars:
Amanda Seyfried, Ethan Hawke, Cedric the Entertainer
In his seminal 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (written
at age 24, two years before he turned from film criticism to
filmmaking), Schrader noted that, “The many statements [Robert] Bresson
has made in interviews and discussions, properly arranged, would
constitute an accurate analysis of his films (a statement which can be
made of no other filmmaker to my knowledge)….” It’s an astute remark,
but one which Schrader perhaps now should amend to include himself.
In
recent times, and especially since “First Reformed” debuted at the
Toronto Film Festival last fall, the writer/director has spoken about
his work in numerous interviews and discussions, and his comments—which I
encourage interested readers to seek out—are invariably as stimulating
and insightful as they are candid.
While many artists take pains
to disguise the influences on their work, Schrader jovially confesses
his, and says that the important thing is not to avoid stealing from
others but to do it intelligently and strategically. From one angle,
“First Reformed” is an unreformed film critic’s tour through a strain or
tradition of art-filmmaking that molded him, as well as a tribute to
masters including Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer and, of course, Bresson.
Brought
up in the Christian Reformed Church, a strict Calvinist denomination,
Schrader was raised without movies but became enchanted with their
forbidden pleasures when he encountered them. Later, in discovering
Bresson’s “Pickpocket,”
he was electrified because “I sensed a bridge between the spirituality I
was raised with and the ‘profane’ cinema I loved. And it was a bridge
of STYLE not content.”
That last point is crucial. Schrader
continued, “Church people had been using movies since they first moved
to illustrate religious beliefs, but this was something different. The
convergence of spirituality and cinema would occur in style not content.
In the How, not the What.”
The idea of spiritual meaning
expressed in style is deftly encapsulated in the first shot of “First
Reformed,” a neat synecdoche for the whole film. The camera tracks
slowly forward as it gazes up at the stark white facade of an
18th century church in New York State. The building’s elegantly
restrained colonial architecture, the gray sky, the stately camera
movement and music all convey an austere gravity, which, together with
Schrader’s use of Academy ratio (inspired, he has said, by Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida”), point us back not only to an earlier era of American religion but also to such European cinema models as Bergman’s “Winter Light” and Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest.”
With his angular frame and ankle-length black cassock, the church’s
pastor has a similar iconic starkness. The Rev. Ernst Toller (Hawke) is a
troubled man. The congregation that faces him from the church’s spartan
pews is minuscule. At night, alone, he drinks and begins to confess his
misery to a journal (a Bressonian device that Schrader has used in “Taxi Driver,” “Light Sleeper”
and other films). We soon learn what’s behind his agonized countenance:
He was a happily married military chaplain when he encouraged his
soldier son to go to Iraq. The son was killed, Toller’s marriage
collapsed and he was left devastated. His assignment at this
church—which seems to do more business in tourist trinkets than souls—is
equal parts penance and abnegation.
The world’s misery begins to intrude on his own when a pregnant young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried)
enlists Toller to counsel her husband, who she believes wants her to
have an abortion out of despair over the world’s future. Michael (Philip Ettinger)
is an environmental activist who may be a congenital depressive but who
also has solid reasons for his pessimism. In a long, striking scene
early in the film, one that reminds us of Schrader’s skills as a writer,
the young man and Toller discuss the ways humanity is rapidly
despoiling the earth and the planet’s bleak future prospects. While the
pastor urges that there are still plenty of reasons for hope, it seems
he may have been influenced by Michael’s words as much as the other way
around.
This situation grows more dire when Mary tells Toller
she’s discovered a suicide vest that Michael has constructed. Does the
activist plan to protest humanity’s destruction by staging his own?
While he grapples with this, Toller faces challenges on other fronts
too. Pissing blood makes him suspect he has a serious illness. His
ecclesiastical superior, the buoyant pastor of a local megachurch (a
fine performance by Cedric the Entertainer), tries to coax him out of
his gloom and enlist his help in planning for the celebration of his
church’s 250th anniversary. That effort begins to stick in Toller’s
craw, though, when he realizes the extent to which it will be run by a
bullying local rightwing polluter for whom he feels the deepest
contempt.
Unless I miss my guess, “First Reformed” will find its least
receptive audiences among those who want either a conventional
psychological drama or a dogmatic exposition of spiritual themes.
Neither is what Schrader’s after. From the first, style as a way of engendering spiritual consciousness has been his primary concern. In a welcome new edition of Transcendental Style,
he writes of creating “an alternate film reality—a transcendent one,”
in which, “The filmmaker, rather than creating a world in which the
viewer need only surrender … creates a world in which the spectator must
contemplate—or reject out of hand.”
Will the film’s most
appreciative viewers be those who know Schrader’s writings, his previous
work and the great films whose influence he freely acknowledges? No
doubt. Yet “First Reformed” leaves its large front door open to anyone
who accepts its invitation to adopt a contemplative stance toward
cinema. For those who do, the film’s peculiar mysteries and beauties
will be evident throughout: in its restrained compositions and uses of
silence and empty space, in the almost liturgical unfolding of its
narrative, in a climactic scene of imaginary flight and a final scene
that seems aptly designed to leave one catching one’s breath, caught in
the very act of contemplating this tale of faith and its worldly
opponents.
And then there’s the solid anchor provided by
Hawke’s performance as Toller. A fine actor from the beginning, Hawke
has been growing exponentially in recent years, and this is his most
expertly, movingly crafted performance yet. It is no exaggeration to say
that he has given Schrader a suffering priest equal to those of Bresson
and Bergman.
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