Film review

Paul Schrader (2017)

Long ago, films about priests who were unequivocal heroes were mainstream Hollywood fare and occasional Oscar winners.  Boys Town (1938) and Going My Way (1944) are the two examples that immediately come to mind.  Now, of course, it’s virtually impossible to make a movie with a professional man of God at its centre unless he’s tortured by religious doubt, traumatised by his past and so on.  John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary (2014) had the nifty idea of attaching the central character’s torments to a whodunit – more precisely, a who’ll-do-it – plot.  Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is, in more ways than one, something else.  An absorbing character study and a self-sufficient drama, it also draws on or references several illustrious priest-story antecedents in cinema and literature, and, in effect, places itself in relation to them.  The film invokes too the work for which Schrader, in spite of his lengthy career, is perhaps still best known:  the screenplay of Taxi Driver (1976).  The connection of the moral crusades of Travis Bickle and this new film’s protagonist, the Reverend Ernst Toller, is a main reason why First Reformed becomes problematic.

Toller (Ethan Hawke) is the pastor of the (Dutch) First Reformed Church in Snowbridge, New York State.  The church, about to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its original consecration, now operates under the aegis of Abundant Life, a thriving megachurch in the neighbourhood.  Toller’s church is of largely historical interest and described by Abundant Life’s head Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyles) as ‘a tourist church nobody goes to’.  Toller himself refers to it as ‘the souvenir shop’.  His usual congregation is in single figures.  Two of those present at the film’s opening service are a young married couple.  Afterwards, the wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks Toller if he’ll talk with her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger):  she’s worried about Michael’s state of mind.  The handful of worshippers, the young wife’s urgent request and early indications, through Toller’s voiceover, that the priest is struggling to hold on to his faith and oppressed by the silence of God combine to evoke Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963).  As Schrader’s story develops, so does Toller’s kinship with the ailing curé in Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Robert Bresson’s adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel.  As a ‘whisky priest’, Toller also calls to mind the nameless protagonist of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory[1].

Ernst Toller is a diarist, like Travis Bickle and Bernanos’s priest (although the latter’s ‘diary’ is actually a looser first-person narrative than a series of dated entries).  Toller is quite clear, from the outset, that he will keep the journal for one year only, before destroying it.  A diary may seem an old-fashioned storytelling mechanism and an easy short cut to the expression of the priest’s inner thoughts and feelings.  One effect of watching First Reformed is certainly to increase appreciation of Bergman’s and his lead actor Gunnar Björnstrand’s achievement in conveying so much about Pastor Ericsson in Winter Light without recourse to explanatory voiceover.  Schrader’s device works well, even so.  It situates Toller in a kind of confessional tradition, of which he’s conscious.  A great admirer of Thomas Merton, he knows that many questioning, doubt-wracked Christians before him have experienced a dark night of the soul.

Schrader’s minister’s tragic personal backstory is specifically twenty-first century.  He used to be a military chaplain, as his father and grandfather were.  Ernst Toller is the last of the line:  his only son was killed in Iraq, after being encouraged by his father to join the armed forces.  Toller’s marriage ended in the aftermath of his son’s death, for which he continues to feel guilty.  The malaise affecting the young man whose wife seeks Toller’s help has also been modernised from the equivalent crisis in Winter Light.   Bergman’s fisherman Jonas Persson is oppressed by fears of nuclear war.   Schrader’s Michael is an environmental activist, convinced that damage to the planet through climate change is now beyond repair.  Mary (like her Bergman counterpart) is pregnant; Michael can’t accept the responsibility of bringing a new life into a world bound to disintegrate in the foreseeable future.   One element of the source materials that requires no updating is the nature of the main character’s physical illness.  The young priest in Bresson’s film has stomach cancer.  Toller, after repeatedly delaying a visit to the doctor, undergoes a series of medical tests that look set to confirm a similar diagnosis.

Schrader presents what is, to an outsider at least, a plausible picture of present-day Christian organisation in North America.  Toller’s roles extend well beyond preaching to a diminishing flock.  Running a museum is a significant part of his job:  he shows tourists round the church (and puts up with their organ jokes); he talks to groups of local schoolkids, a more pleasurable experience.  Although there’s a verger of sorts (Bill Hoag), it seems to fall to Toller to keep the graveyard tidy and unblock the toilet in the men’s rest room.  In contrast, over at the megachurch, Pastor Jeffers appropriately wears a business suit rather than clerical garb.  The confidently evangelical Abundant Life is altogether a big deal[2].  Its operation benefits considerably from the financial support of an industrialist member of its congregation, Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), chief executive of a big chemicals company.   The forthcoming commemoration of First Reformed’s sestercentennial, to be simulcast, will be attended by local dignitaries including the mayor, the state governor and Balq, as well as Jeffers and a busload of Abundant Life regulars.  The event presents, most unusually, a space planning challenge at Toller’s church.

Mary’s husband follows the example of Jonas Persson by shooting himself soon after the priest has counselled him but eco-activist Michael’s impact on subsequent events is more dramatic than Jonas’s – and the route into Taxi Driver territory.  The day before Michael’s suicide, Mary discovers in their garage a suicide vest and seeks Toller’s help and advice.   He agrees to counsel Michael again and to dispose quietly of the vest, without informing the police.  Michael commits a different form of suicide before Toller has the chance to talk further with him.  You immediately wonder how exactly Toller will get rid of the bomber kit and this doesn’t happen.  He also volunteers to help Mary out by clearing Michael’s laptop of any questionable material; in doing so, the priest becomes more persuaded of the urgent rightness of the dead man’s cause.  In accordance with Michael’s written wishes, Toller conducts his funeral service at a toxic waste dump and supervises the scattering of his ashes there.  Footage of the service on YouTube comes to the attention of Balq, who makes his displeasure known to Jeffers and Toller.  The latter fights his corner.  He can’t accept Balq’s argument that climate change issues are ‘complicated’; for Toller, preserving the earth is a straightforward matter of Christian stewardship.  He puts up outside his church a sign ‘Can God forgive us?’ (subtext:  ‘for wrecking the planet’).  Balq seeks assurance that Toller won’t say anything ‘political’ at the big commemoration service.  Toller gives this assurance but only because he intends to let actions speak louder than words at the occasion, wearing Michael’s suicide vest.

Paul Schrader, born in 1946 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, received a Calvinist upbringing so strict that he didn’t see a movie until he was seventeen (and then did so without his parents’ knowledge).  His abiding obsessions with religion and pathology produce some startling juxtapositions in First Reformed.  The first indication of Toller’s illness comes in a shot of his bloody urine in the toilet bowl.  Schrader then cuts to choir practice at Abundant Life, with a chorus of ‘Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?’  As he tries on the suicide vest for size, Toller’s voiceover reads Ephesians 6:11, ‘Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’.   At another point, Toller reads:

‘And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.’

That’s from the Book of Revelation (11:18), which reinforces the apocalyptic atmosphere.

A priest with a military background becoming a radicalised Christian holy warrior is a potent dramatic idea.  Ernst Toller, in one respect, is a more plausible avenging angel than Travis Bickle.  With his Mohawk hairstyle, sinister dark glasses and combat jacket, Robert De Niro’s Travis is a compelling image but so conspicuous that not apprehending him comes across in Taxi Driver less as a failure of the political candidate’s security men than of the film itself.   No one, however, would suspect what Ethan Hawke’s Toller is wearing beneath his cassock.  Another and more fundamental difference between Travis and Toller works to the disadvantage of First Reformed.  While both are greatly troubled souls, Travis is socially isolated and mentally unstable.  Toller, for all his anguish about his faith, his health and the state of the planet, always seems sane and self-aware, even in his cups.  How would this highly intelligent, self-questioning man not wrestle with his conscience over causing the death of people (who, unlike Edward Balq, might well be personally conscientious about the environment)?   The plot’s increasing improbability prevents the latterday Travis Bickle aspect of the story from coming fully to life – gives it an academic, compare-and-contrast quality.

Toller has two important relationships with women, one of which is based very clearly on Winter Light.  Esther (Victoria Hill), who’s in charge of the choir at Abundant Life, is devoted to Toller.  It seems they had a very transitory physical relationship, which Toller wishes they hadn’t had.  Esther is still determined to have as much social contact with him as possible and is very concerned about his physical health.  He is as alienated by Esther’s emotional neediness as Pastor Ericsson was by the schoolteacher Märta’s in Winter Light.  At quite an early point in the extended, gruelling conversation between them, Märta says tearfully to Ericsson, ‘You sound as if you hated me’.   Schrader picks this up in the exchange between Toller and Esther in which he tells her, ‘I hate you for what you bring out of me’[3].  This frank brutality, obviously inspired by Bergman, doesn’t quite ring true of Toller, a more carefully sensitive, less selfishly saturnine individual than Ericsson.  But Victoria Hill is more naturally believable as Esther than Ingrid Thulin, in spite of her brilliant acting, is as Märta.

The second relationship is more or less original, and crucial, to First Reformed.  Ericsson does no more than pay a call on Jonas Persson’s widow (of course, the timeframe of Winter Light is relatively very compressed – the few hours between noon and evening services on the same Sunday).   The growing mutual attraction between Toller and Mary is well done, perceptible but never telegraphed.  It moves, in every sense, to a new level, when Mary, suffering a panic attack, comes to see Toller.  She tells him that, when this happened while Michael was alive, they would smoke a joint and lie on top of each other, synchronising their breathing:  they called it the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’.  Toller asks if she’d like him to assist in the same therapy.  He realises, as soon as the question is out of his mouth, that he’s jumped the gun and given himself away but Mary, although initially surprised, takes up the offer.  Toller lies on his back and Mary on top of him.  They start to breathe together; then their bodies levitate.  Even if it wasn’t supernatural, this moment would be striking in a film whose camera movement is, for the most part, so limited – a visual affirmation of Toller’s lack of room for manoeuvre and Schrader’s uncompromising determination to grip the viewer.   It says a lot for the accumulating intensity of the narrative that the levitation, while it’s happening, doesn’t seem excessive or silly.  Unfortunately, Toller’s itinerary on the Magical Mystery Tour that follows is predictable and anti-climactic.   His mind is transported to starry skies, oceans and mountains, which then give way to images of industrial waste.

This sequence is some sort of preparation for the film’s closing, differently transcendent scene.  Mary decides to stay with her sister in Canada in the last stages of her pregnancy but is keen to return to Snowbridge for the commemorative service.  Toller, knowing what he plans to do there, tells her to stay away.  She comes nevertheless.  He catches sight of her through a window as he’s completing his terrorist preparations, which he then feels compelled to abandon.  Instead, he decides to sacrifice himself.  He replaces the suicide vest with barbed wire that he winds round his bare flesh.  The drain cleaner he used to unblock the rest room toilet he now prepares to drink.  This speedy improvisation on Toller’s part suggests a modern Christ figure more single-minded than the original.  Pastor Jeffers was right when, in exasperation, he earlier complained to Toller, ‘you’re always in the garden’ – Gethsemane, not Eden.  ‘For you’, says Jeffers, ‘every hour is the darkest hour’.  Whereas Jesus asked his heavenly father ‘to let this cup pass from me’, Toller is ready to down the drain cleaner without hesitation.  Until Mary enters.

Back in the church, Esther is singing a solo of ‘Leaning (On the Everlasting Arms)’ – a solo much extended, by order of Jeffers, thanks to Toller’s failure to appear for the service.    Paul Schrader’s sustained evocation of cinema’s religious obsessives and men in clerical black continues right into these closing details.  The barbed wire brings to mind the self-mutilation in John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979) of Hazel Motes, apostle of ‘the Church of Truth Without Christ’.   The persistence of ‘Leaning’ on the soundtrack inevitably echoes Robert Mitchum’s false preacher in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).  In other respects, though, the final, extended embrace between Mary and Toller seems disappointingly banal.  I don’t understand what Schrader means to say here.  I doubt it’s as simple as that true-salvation-is-the-love-between-two-human-beings.  In spite of the distinctive build-up – a mixture of severity and luridness – this is how the ending of First Reformed comes across.

Ethan Hawke inhabits his character with a pleasantly surprising lack of strain and adroitly differentiates Toller’s manner according to whom he’s speaking to.  He builds the scene in which the minister counsels Michael especially well, from nervous, affable sociability as he accepts and drinks a mug of tea to growing intellectual excitement in the debate that develops.  The dialogue here is extremely well written – realistically credible and structured to enable the two actors to illustrate the effect on each other their words are having.  (Toller, although borne along on his increasing articulacy, is more concernedly anxious to help Michael than the coldly frank Pastor Ericsson was to reassure Jonas Persson in Winter Light.   Though Michael, who’s ‘spiritual’ but not a believer as Mary is, is less susceptible than Persson might have been to religious reassurance.)  Participating in a discussion group for teenagers and young adults at Abundant Life, Toller is asked to respond to a girl who can’t understand why her father, a diligently practising Christian, has lost his job.  Hawke conveys very well Toller’s awareness that the girl doesn’t want to be told a virtuous life is no passport to prosperity and his moral compulsion to tell her this anyway.   (His advice causes outrage elsewhere in the group.)   It’s nice to see an actor in an existential crisis role give nuanced attention to dramatically lower-key moments as well as to the in extremis highlights, which Ethan Hawke plays powerfully.   Millions more people are going to see Amanda Seyfried in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again than will see her in First Reformed; it’s good to be reminded from her portrait of Mary that Seyfried is a very capable actress.  Cedric Kyles is strong as Pastor Jeffers and Schrader’s writing of this role is far from crude.  He implies that Jeffers does have a real faith albeit one that aligns reliably with professional self-interest.

First Reformed is being hailed by many critics as the finest achievement of Paul Schrader’s career.   It’s unarguably a kind of summation of his continuing preoccupations as a film-maker and a considerable addition to the cinematic tradition of turbulent priest dramas.  It’s impressive to look at:  Alexander Dynan’s photography infuses many of the scenes with an austerely beautiful (and entirely apt) wintry light.  Various music, including the rumbling original score by Lustmord (aka Brian Williams), is put to uniformly effective use.  Yet its flaws are too major for First Reformed to be fully successful.  The Travis Bickle reworking isn’t persuasive.  Although Schrader prepares the ground by making Toller ambivalent from the start about keeping a diary, his abandonment of it coincides too conveniently with the writer-director’s need to ignore the priest’s thoughts about the implications of his eco-terrorism.  Schrader minimises Mary’s and Toller’s reactions to their Magical-Mystery-Tour intimacy to maximise the impact of their final coming together but that scene, when it arrives and they feel the comfort of each other’s everlasting arms, functions as an eye-catching escape route out of the movie.

To commend a film as ‘brave’ often means very little (The Happy Prince and Rupert Everett’s performance in it have recently been so described) but it’s fair enough in this case.  Schrader’s picture is commercially daring, at any rate.  Granted I saw it on a hot Friday afternoon but the turnout at Curzon Richmond was even smaller than for Ernst Toller’s services.   First Reformed isn’t in the class of Diary of a Country Priest, Winter Light or Taxi Driver but that’s hardly a disgrace.  It’s still a good film, thanks to its seriousness of purpose, and the calibre of much of the acting and writing.  It’s a grim film too, yet a pleasure to watch because Paul Schrader shows such valiant, imaginative intelligence in struggling, like his protagonist, with intractable issues.

13 July 2018

[1] John Ford’s The Fugitive (1947) is loosely based on Greene’s novel.  The Power and the Glory was also adapted for television in the US, in a 1959 production starring Laurence Olivier.

[2] According to Wikipedia, the definition of a megachurch is:  ‘a Christian church having 2,000 or more people in average weekend attendance. …The concept originated in the mid 19th century, continued into the mid 20th century as a low-key phenomenon, and expanded rapidly throughout 1980s and 1990s; it is widely seen across the world as of the early 21st century’.

[3] Or words to that effect – I may not have remembered this verbatim.