A breakdown worthy of Taxi Driver
‘God is not a torturer,” the sickly young curé advised in Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. “He only wants us to be merciful with ourselves.” Perhaps someone should leave a copy of the DVD in Ernst Toller’s collection plate.
Superbly played by Ethan Hawke in a kind of ecstasy of misery, the Reverend Toller is a holy loner in the Bressonian mould.
He is also the anti-hero of this ferocious spiritual thriller from Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver, and writer-director of American Gigolo.
It’s Schrader’s best film in decades, and recaptures the chilling end-times desolation of his finest work.
Toller keeps his apocalyptic side in check with whisky and reflection, scratching out his thoughts in longhand in a diary by night.
His base of operations is a church in upstate New York – a sparsely attended 18th-century box of white wood with a thin spire pointed accusatorially heavenwards, hemmed in by grey skies and spidery trees.
An ex-military type shouldering a horrible burden of grief from his past, Toller is less a spiritual adviser than a glorified janitor and tour guide. A typical day involves fixing a leak in the bathroom then showing some visitors around, making sure to lead them out past the souvenir stand.
The only cause that grabs him is one involving two of his parishioners, and possibly borrowed from Bergman’s Winter Light.
A young couple turn up one Sunday morning at their wits’ end. Mary (Amanda Seyfried) is expecting a baby – but Michael (Philip Ettinger), her environmental activist husband, wants her to have an abortion, on the grounds that it would be a greater act of cruelty to bring a child into a world racked by climate change.
At Mary’s suggestion, the two men sit down to a heart-to-heart. Like much of the film, the scene is simple, even low-key, but is performed and shot with a subtlety and control that makes your sinews snap. Toller shares a tragic story from his own past, and Michael seems consoled. But soon after, Mary finds an explosive vest buried under boxes in the garage, and fears that Michael may be planning some kind of attack. For Toller, eco-terrorism seems worlds apart from the business of preparing his church for its impending 250th anniversary celebrations.
But as he becomes attuned to corruption in his own parish, involving a local oil man whose donations start to seem a lot like look-the-other-way money, the churchman starts to wonder: should it be?
There is an unmistakable Taxi Driver flavour to Toller’s ensuing breakdown, but it also often feels like a contemporary cover version of Diary of a Country Priest, albeit with a quiverful of poison-tipped twists strapped to its back.
Yet it doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird, with violence, levitations, apocalyptic visions, and Neil Young protest songs chanted sombrely by toxic swamps. And its scalding critique of the very strange, very American accord between big religion and bigger business makes it intensely of its moment.
First Reformed has a darkness that clings to your skin, and a chill that lingers like a funeral bell.