First Reformed (15) ★★★★☆
PAUL Schrader, writer of such landmark American classics as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, writes and directs this challenging but hugely rewarding film which powerfully explores one man’s crisis of faith in a world where issues of environmentalism often go ignored.
The endlessly fascinating man in question is Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke). He’s an ill, alcoholic, ex-military man of the cloth who for the last few years has been assigned to the eponymous small “tourist” chapel in upstate New York following the devastating loss of his son and subsequent divorce from his wife.
His spiritual breakdown begins when a local woman, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), who is pregnant, requests that he speaks with her troubled husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger).
He wants to have the baby aborted due to feeling guilty about bringing a child into a world that doesn’t seem to care about issues such as overpopulation and climate change.
As the 250th anniversary celebration of his church approaches, Toller decides to start a handwritten diary that he will keep up for exactly one year before destroying it.
Meanwhile, his increasingly erratic behaviour starts becoming an issue for his boss, the Reverend Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer) and the rest of the religious community.
This is an austere, frank, overpowering film that tackles big questions in intelligent ways.
Schrader is dealing with complex themes – commitment to faith in what feel like overwhelmingly trying times, the difference between faith in God and adherence to church doctrine and the need to act when others will not.
“Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind simultaneously: hope and despair,” Toller proclaims to the expectant father who can see nothing but a hopeless future for the planet.
These encapsulate Toller’s journey as a man who finds the darkness of the world around him encroaching on the light brought about by his work. Proving why he’s one of the finest American actors working today, Hawke brings a believable sense of the anguish that is eroding this compellingly off-kilter character’s sense of endurance.
It feels as if his sense of guilt, isolation and barely-contained exasperation pours out to form the very atmosphere of the film. It’s one of the most fascinating portrayals in ages of a character in torment.
Something of a return to form after questionable tosh such as Dog Eat Dog and The Canyons, Schrader’s latest offering is absorbing, uncomfortable, complex and unapologetically bold in the narrative and spiritual roads it travails. Love it or hate it, it’ll send you away thinking.
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