Any serious film about Christianity skirts the absurd. Tertullian identified the absurdity fundamental to Christianity in the second and third centuries A.D. The New Testament makes no secret about the fact that the central doctrines believed by Christians are a "scandal" (skandalon or "stumbling block") to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. The greatest movie ever made about faith and Christianity is Carl Dreyer's Ordet (1955), a film that is deeply and comically foolish (one character is said to have lost his mind because of Kierkegaard) until it's last two reels, imagery showing the resurrection of the dead that is either utterly ridiculous or transcendentally beautiful depending upon your point of view It's a measure of Paul Schrader's grave and often, stunningly, moving film, First Reformed (2018), that viewers are either transported into another ineffable realm or simply, and derisively, indifferent to the agony that the picture portrays. I admire the movie and suggest that it is a great film. And, yet, I also must admit that exactly where the film strains hardest for the sublime, it falls flat -- and, in fact, can't evade the criticism that elements of the picture are deeply silly.
A gaunt and ascetic-looking Ethan Hawke plays an alcoholic pastor, marooned and preaching to a tiny congregation gathered in the pews of 250-year old Church. At one point, a character calls the place a "souvenir church" -- this is because the congregation barely survives, in part, by selling tee-shirts and hats featuring First Reform as a historic place catering to tourists. The organ doesn't work -- indeed, both organs: the pastor is pissing blood and, apparently, dying from a variety of ailments. He starts a diary recording this dark night of the soul and, then, encounters a young woman, Marie, who asks him to counsel her troubled husband. Marie's husband is deeply disturbed, a man who considers humanity's transgressions against nature and our climate as unforgiveable sins. The young man, who has served time for some kind of eco-terrorism, wants Marie to have an abortion so that their child will not be born into the doomed, sinful, and polluted world that global climate change signifies. The young man argues about hope and the future with the pastor and, then, kills himself. In a harrowing scene, the Hawk's Pastor Toler, finds the corpse, head blown apart by shotgun blast. The young man's widow has discovered that her husband was on his way to transitioning from a eco-terrorist to a real terrorist -- there is vest equipped with powerful fused explosives hidden the man's garage. Toler is badly damaged -- his son died in Iraq and his wife divorced him over the pastor's decision to encourage the young man's military service. And, as the film progresses, he becomes increasingly deranged, although there is a core of sanity to his rebellion against the ruined world and its people.
This plot is skillfully positioned as a foil to the upcoming 250th anniversary celebration at First Reformed. The small andl ancient church, formerly a stop on the Underground Railway, has become a satellite to huge Mega-Church (it's sanctuary seats 5000) run by an avuncular and successful Black clergyman -- this figure is played very effectively by Cedric Kyle (the comedian otherwise known as Cedric the Entertainer). The 250th centennial is planned as a gathering of the wealthy and politically well-connected, including the CEO of a petrochemical energy company who doesn't believe in climate change and who is making money, Pastor Toler believes, from the rape of the environment. The CEO berates Toler for failing to effectively minister to the young man who committed suicide and, gradually, the pastor's illness and heavy drinking unhinge him. He decides that he will don the suicide bomber's vest and blow up First Reformed when the sanctuary is filled with powerful clergymen, politicians, and the noxious CEO.
Clearly Schrader is making a film that is a book-end to his great early success, the screenplay for Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Many scenes in the movie intentionally mirror images in Taxi Driver -- like Travis Bickel, Pastor Toler keeps a diary, here an open book of neatly handwritten notes lit luminously like the Holy Writ. (Throughout the film, Schrader highlights the Logos or the Word -- we see the Gospel printed on the façade of the Abundant Life Mega-church and projected as a mural on the cafeteria wall in that church; the dead man's Last Testament, another text, is also crucial to the film.) Toler drives around town to menacing music and sees the depravity of the Fallen World that he now seeks to punish by destroying those that he defines as wicked and depraved. These images cite the famous scenes of the taxi crawling the muck and slime of New York City. In several scenes, Toler looks at himself in his mirror and squares his shoulders as if to ask the reflection: "Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?" These images reference Taxi Driver effectively and express the fact that we are seeing Schrader's meditation on many of the same issues, most particularly the proper response to evil and depravity in the world, now 45 years after the first movie -- in effect, the film is a sort of diary as to how Schrader's views on this subject have evolved. Most of the movie involves still shots of grey and gloomy landscapes, images of a spectacularly polluted inlet, and long dialogues about hope and grace, the possibility of salvation and the duties of a Christian in the world. After the first of these debates, the pastor in a voice-over tells us that his conversation with the young, despairing man was like Jacob wrestling with the angel, a mortal combat with the highest of all stakes, and "it was exhilarating" Toler tells us. Most of First Reformed is exhilarating -- the debates are perfectly pitched, the dialogue wonderfully astute and witty and, even, realistic. The pastor of the Mega-Church is a role that seems ripe for snarky parody, but, in fact, Schrader writes the part generously -- the businessman-pastor is doing real good in the world and he tells Toler that he needs to "lighten up": "you're not always praying in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before the Passion." And he gently, even kindly, derides Toler for his unworldliness. Toler has a had a sexual relationship with a very compassionate and loving woman, a choir director at the Mega-Church, but he pushes her away as he descends into madness and the scene in the movie that is hardest to watch is not Toler wrapping his naked torso in barbed wire until he is covered in blood but his vicious verbal attack on a woman who's only crime is that she wishes him well.
Spoilers follow:
First Reformed is exquisitely shot. The camera moves in only a couple scenes, but, then, ecstatically. Further, the film is intentionally humble -- it is shot in the old pillar-boxed format of German pictures from the early 30's. The image is intentionally smaller than any modern screen on which the movie will be shown. The acting is superb and the dialogue exceptionally intelligent and gripping. So what is wrong with the film? The two scenes that Schrader highlights as evidence of the presence of some kind of divinity in the world don't really work -- these sequences are striking but they raise the wrong kind of questions in the viewer's mind. In the first of these transcendental scenes, the suicide's widow lies atop the pastor, stretched out like Christ crucified, and they agree to breathe in harmony with one another, face to face. But Toler has been drinking heavily and the question that afflicts the viewer is a simple and ugly one: what does his breath smell like? (The minister has been slugging down a bottle of whisky a night mixed with pink peptobismol -- this shown in a horrifying close-up.) After the manner of Tarkovsky's films, the two levitate. Tarkovsky was wise enough to content himself with mere levitation -- Schrader has the couple floating like a blimp over the milky way and, then, various landscapes, including those ruined by pollution. The scene would be much better and more moving without the magical mystery tour of the cosmos and the girl (played wonderfully by Amanda Seyfried) should have been shown averting her face for a moment and scrunching up her nose at the horrible bad breath of our sorrowful pastor. Similar cavils undercut the ecstatic climax. Just as he is about to commit suicide, Marie enters the Pastor's parsonage and embraces him. But we have just seen the poor bastard wrapping his shoulders and chest and belly in razor wire -- his torso is oozing blood from a hundred wounds. So when Marie wraps her arms around him and begins kissing his face and, then, hugging him to her, she is, of course, driving the barbed wire further into his mortified flesh. You can't have the scene with barbed wire and the big bear hugs at the end without considering that the girl's embrace may well be lethal and, if nothing, else would be agonizingly painful. I suppose I am interpreting the film too literally but these were the thoughts afflicting me at the climax -- thoughts that wholly subverted what Schrader was trying to accomplish. In an interview, Schrader has said that he intended that his hero drink Drano and die -- this is more in keeping with the exceptionally somber ending after the ending. The rejected choir director sings a terrifying, zombie-like version of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while we see the hero pouring his Drano cocktail and, then, embracing Marie. Right in the middle of the song, the soundtrack goes dead, shockingly, totally dead and there is a long black frame -- probably ten seconds of silence and darkness before the film's credits roll, all under starkly and uncompromisingly mournful-sounding closing music, really more of an ominous drone than any kind of tune. I think Schrader would have been better off with the suicide ending, but I respect him for trying to salvage some tiny trace of grace, some fugitive moment of redemption from these painful circumstances. Tragedy is facile. Schrader tries for something more profound than tragedy -- he doesn't get it right, but I salute him for the effort.
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