You preachin’ to me, Rev? REVIEWS
FIRST REFORMED
Starring Ethan Hawke. Rated 14A
Devoid of comfort or decora- 2
tion, the stark white Dutch Reformed church so central to Paul Schrader’s new film epitomizes the extreme austerity of his approach. Schrader shoots everything with a grim sense of restraint, which makes the few acts of violence here stand out—well, like brains splattered across snow.
In what might be the best performance of his career, Ethan Hawke plays the Reverend Toller, head of a 250-year-old institution in wintry upstate New York. He ministers to a dwindling congregation by day, retiring alone to his spartan quarters with its bad plumbing at night.
By all appearances he leads a strict devotional life. But while he has to be the rock, counselling his congregation members when they have troubles, he is battling illness and his own nagging demons. This all becomes apparent as he helps Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a young, pregnant woman whose eco-activist (possibly ecoterrorist) husband is so distraught about the Earth’s impending environmental apocalypse that he wants her to get an abortion.
Trying to convince the man that life is worth living sends Toller into his own crisis of faith—not to mention deep into the bottle. Hawke is perfectly buttoned up here, calm, quiet, and reassuring as the minister, only subtly suggesting his tight white collar can barely contain his suffering. He is grappling with a world in crisis, one he’s realizing can’t be healed by prayer.
His beliefs seem even more rocked by his financial reliance on a crassly commercialized, corporatebacked megachurch called Abundant Life—a place that equates piety with prosperity.
In its portrait of a man losing his grasp on sanity, and its themes of misguided martyrdom, First Reformed sometimes echoes Schrader’s script for the timeless Taxi Driver. It also reflects Schrader’s ongoing big life questions, as someone still grappling with his strict Calvinist upbringing, mixed with the doom anxiety that plagues these troubled times.
But what sets First Reformed apart is Schrader’s relentless reserve—his stark, motionless takes, his meticulously framed shots, Hawke’s flat narration, and the lack of any soundtrack until a gnawing industrial roar sets in toward the end.
The film is about as comforting and inviting as those hard white pews, but stay put: all that restraint makes the climax’s mix of the biblical, the bloody, and the rapturous a bolt of undiluted power—one that may rock your own foundations.
> JANET SMITH
with its weakest parts: two brief codas, set in 1975 and the present, that feel rushed and sentimental in ways that don’t fit with what’s gone before. As so often happens, foreplay turns out to be the best part.
> KEN EISNER
First Reformed.
Starring Juliette Binoche. In French, with English subtitles. Rated 14A
The limits of art, and of viewer 2
patience, are tested in the deceptively named Let the Sunshine In—a movie that hardly allows air between words, or real warmth between humans.
The great Juliette Binoche plays Isabelle, a successful painter who has recently divorced for reasons never made plain. It’s not hard to imagine why, given the restless way she wanders the wintry streets of Paris, dressed with élan and looking for what she calls true love. The affairs we see don’t look especially promising.
First up is her ongoing thing with an oily banker (Xavier Beauvois) who really loves his wife, but oh, you kid! “I just got back from Brazil,” he states, shoving a bouquet in her face, “and I felt like banging you!” The flowers were de trop, apparently, and she suddenly fixes on a handsome stage actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle). On their first date, he whines about his work and says he’s leaving his wife, but hasn’t told her yet. Uh-huh. She insists on taking him to bed, and then feels offended when he’s the one who says “Too soon.” That dynamic is repeated many times, with Isabelle crying out for old-fashioned amour, men expressing ambivalence, and her pushing them around until she can judge their performances as, you know, lacking something.
Veteran filmmaker Claire Denis, working with playwright Christine Angot (both riffing on essays about love by Roland Barthes), was brave to create a character so unlikable, and so utterly dependent on and somehow immune to male validation. (Cue Etta James singing “At Last”.) One remarkable scene depicts Isabelle working on a large canvas, but her work feels distant from the story. As always, Binoche is never less than believable, but what are we being asked to believe?
Denis got in hot water recently for mocking the #Metoo movement; she’s always had a volatile relationship with the politics of race, sex, and class, starting with her first feature, Chocolat, set in French colonial Africa. (Binoche also starred in a film of that name, directed by Lasse Hallström. And Beauvois, the banking Lothario here, was in yet another Chocolat, from 2016, about a black belle-époque clown.)
In the final scene, running under the end credits, Binoche is paired with a mountainous Gérard Depardieu, seemingly playing a therapist. Actually, he’s a glorified fortuneteller, skilled at mansplaining what middle-aged women want to hear. Isabelle fails to notice that he’s mostly making a case for his spiritual journey into her pants. Or maybe he just thinks she has some chocolate.
> KEN EISNER
Let the Sunshine In,