Faith, amid all the despair Director Schrader returns to silver screen with complex view of religion and belief By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Jun. 14, 2018

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Bleak, wintry and rigorously controlled — until it’s not — this Book of Job-like drama from American filmmaker Paul Schrader looks at the challenges of faith.

The 71-year-old Schrader, known for scripting four Martin Scorsese films (including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) and for directing his own (including American Gigolo, Affliction and Auto Focus), grew up in a strict Calvinist home — he famously did not see a film until he was 17 — and has always been drawn to stories of agonizing and uncertain redemption.

As the Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke) wrestles with what it means to lead a righteous life in our badly broken world, his spiritual fate remains in doubt. It is certain, however, that First Reformed marks a cinematic rebirth for Schrader after recent disasters like The Canyons and Dog Eat Dog. Serious, complex and moving, this is not a perfect film, but even its flaws are powerful.

Toller is a solitary man who has come to the ministry late in life, after a family tragedy and a failed marriage. First Reformed, a historic church in upstate New York that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, has since been reduced to an austerely beautiful tourist shop, more of a museum than a place of worship.

Ministering to a dwindling congregation, Toller spends his evenings reading the theology of Thomas Merton and writing a longhand journal in which he scrupulously weighs his own shortcomings.

He is also suffering from undiagnosed stomach pain and drinks too much. (Eventually, he just pours the Pepto-Bismol right into his whisky.)

Toller’s failing ministry is underwritten by a nearby megachurch, Abundant Life, which offers padded pews, technologically enhanced services and a glib form of prosperity gospel, in which faith is thought to be awarded with good fortune.

Abundant Life is led by Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyles, a.k.a. Cedric the Entertainer), who is warm, affable and pragmatic but whose friendship with Toller will be tested by an upcoming celebration of First Reformed’s 250th year.

One of the major donors to that event is Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), a rich bully whose company is a major polluter. Toller, meanwhile, has been approached by Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a young pregnant woman who asks him to counsel her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist so profoundly pessimistic about the Earth’s future he doesn’t want to bring a child into the world.

Through his interactions with Michael, Toller finds something he needs — if not hope, then at least a sense of purpose.

Schrader is purposely ambiguous about Toller’s newfound dedication. Will this be a road to salvation or is he just taking the environmental apocalypse and making it all about him? Toller, after all, has quoted Merton’s notion of despair being a perverse form of pride.

Schrader’s influences in First Reformed include not just Merton but also Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest and Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, along with a bit of Graham Greene and his suffering whisky priests.

But gradually, Toller’s yearning for the modest gifts of everyday grace are overtaken by a Taxi Driver-ish vision of salvation as a lonely, violent, driven fight. Toller becomes, at one point, literally and medievally self-lacerating.

These echoes of Travis Bickle are problematic. Schrader may be right on top of 21st-century radical ecology, but his gender tropes remain stuck. In Toller’s dark night of the soul, Seyfried’s character is seen as a path to redemption — the two share a moment that is either transcendent or kitschy, or possibly transcendently kitschy — but she isn’t allowed to be much more than the youthful, wide-eyed embodiment of feminine innocence and sexual allure.

Ultimately, First Reformed is a “man in a room” story, as Schrader calls it, and Hawke’s performance has to carry the film. And he’s doing possibly his best work here, his anguish remaining stripped-down and disciplined — and with very few actorly flourishes — until the final scene.

And about that final scene, which is at first shocking and then deliberately unclear. Schrader does not answer the film’s crucial questions about doubt and faith. But with this intellectually challenging and emotionally sincere film, watching his flawed and human protagonist wrestle with these uncertainties is enough.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Alison Gillmor
Writer

Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.

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