First Reformed
The best artists don’t go soft as they get older. They become more intensely themselves, like there’s nothing to lose and no gain in lying. Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” is a film with that quality — a direct expression from the soul onto celluloid, unvarnished and uncompromised, and Schrader’s best film in years.
If you know Ingmar Bergman, it has a story something like “Winter Light,” at least in the beginning, and then some things happen, and the film becomes like Bergman as imagined by the guy who wrote “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” and who wrote and directed “Hard Core.” Beyond a similar premise, Schrader shares with Bergman an essential quality, a willingness — or compulsion — to face the truth and state it. Maybe that’s just personal courage manifesting in art.
Ethan Hawke plays a minister at a sparsely attended Dutch Reformed church in upstate New York, and the first time you see him in a clerical collar you might think ... really? Ethan Hawke? A minister? But give this some thought: This is what Ethan Hawke does, isn’t it? Even in comedies, he contemplates existence and ruminates about the meaning of things. If any actor deserves to play clergy, it’s Hawke. He’s earned it.
Right from the beginning, “First Reformed” has a look. The light is crisp and merciless, like a bright winter’s day. Every line on every face is there for audience inspection. Schrader likes extended takes and two-shots, and when he switches to a closeup, he means it. It feels important. And the close-ups themselves are beautiful — not flattering to the actors, but beautiful in themselves — landscapes of humanity.
A young wife (Amanda Seyfried) comes to the priest and asks if he would be willing to counsel her husband. She’s pregnant, and the husband wants her to have an abortion, because he is convinced that the world is going to become unlivable from global warming. Philip Ettinger plays the husband, and he is outstanding in a single long scene with Hawke, in which he goes on and on about climate change, in a way that’s unhinged and obsessive but not exactly wrong.
The minister knows that the cure for this man isn’t reason, but courage, that it’s impossible to think away fear and despair. But the journey of the movie seems to be saying something beyond that, that courage will only get you so far, and that what’s really needed, for every human soul, is love — some forced intrusion of divine grace. Before he was a filmmaker, Schrader was thinking about joining the clergy, and “First Reformed” is a seriously Christian movie. It’s not the usual whitelace Christianity, but a hairyknuckled, sleep-in-the-street variety, and it’s real.
The husband’s torment is debilitating, but typical and understandable — a legitimate concern turned into a toxic fixation. The priest’s despair is deeper and deepening, as he deals with a crisis of faith, an inability to pray, questions about the role of the church and some ominous physical symptoms. Here’s a movie rule for you: Whenever you see a seemingly gratuitous urination scene, and it’s not there for laughs, brace for the quick cut to red toilet water.
“First Reformed” has a confidence about it, the presence of filmmaking consciousness that can’t do wrong, because this time he knows exactly what he wants to say, not only in a general sense, but second by second and shot by shot. At one point, the minister pours himself some whiskey and then drops some Pepto-Bismol into it. Schrader moves in for a shot of the churning Pepto-Bismol, which looks like a human brain or a monster forming.
Somehow, like everything else in this film, it all feels right.
The movie’s Christianity is a hairy-knuckled, sleep-in-the-street variety.