'FIRST REFORMED'
R 1:53 ★★★★
'First Reformed," a mesmerizingly austere drama of one man's apocalyptic crisis of faith, feels like the movie Paul Schrader was put on this planet to make.
As a tense study in spiritual pain and its ultimate release, this handsome production is of a piece with Schrader's most famous screenplays, including "Taxi Driver" and "The Last Temptation of Christ," films that also anticipate this portrait of self-inquiry taken to its most obsessive and outlandish extremes.
At once ruminative and shocking, godwardly inclined and repellently graphic, "First Reformed" is indisputably the finest film Schrader has directed since his sensitive adaptation of Russell Banks' novel "Affliction," the summary of a career spent dwelling on the most hidden dualities of an essential human character that the filmmaker sees as continually torn between its loftiest aspirations and earthiest impulses.
This muted, meditative character study stars Ethan Hawke as Ernst Toller, the pastor of a tiny church in upstate New York whose vaunted place in Revolutionary and Civil War-era history has made it as much a tourist destination as a house of worship. In its quiet, carefully observed opening moments, "First Reformed" sets the tone for what is to come: This will be a film about discernment, a listening for God's call that can either result in ecstatic awakening or abysmal despair.
With his cragged forehead, rakelike frame and ascetic brush-cut, Hawke aptly embodies the latter, as Toller is revealed to be a man grappling with doubt, hopelessness and a crushing sense of guilt. When a young expectant mother named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks Toller to counsel her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), the subsequent encounters will put Toller on a path of even more punishing self-examination.
Hawke, who has been doing so much praiseworthy work in recent years in such films as "Boyhood," "Born to be Blue" and "Maudie," here collaborates seamlessly with writer-director Schrader, who creates still, squared-off frames in which Toller's conversations can be appreciated in all their highly charged glory. When Toller drops by for a heart-to-heart with Michael, what begins as a mildmannered pastoral visit becomes a heart-stopping encounter reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor passage from "The Idiot," or the electrifying central scene between IRA activist Bobby Sands and a priest in Steve McQueen's "Hunger." The stakes are comparably high throughout "First Reformed," as Toller's rising sense of spiritual duty collides with a world bent on its own social and environmental destruction, as well as a Protestant hierarchy more interested in corporate survival and consumerist brand management than the simple, self-abnegating work of Jesus.
Father Toller joins Travis Bickle as an iconic avatar for his age, another loner restlessly searching for truth, moral reckoning and the salvation of a world mired in despondency and pitiless cruelty. Will he succumb to those anxieties, or transcend them? Even when the lights come up on "First Reformed," filmgoers may sense that, like the lamp designed like an all-seeing eye that decorates Mary's living room, only Schrader knows the answer for sure, and he prefers to keep certain holy mysteries intact.
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles (Contains some disturbing violent images.)