“A life without despair is a life without hope,” says the man at the center of Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed.” That paradox embraces the world as it is, and suggests a better world for the making. The movie it belongs to is an act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.
The extremes of temperament and the atmosphere of coiled danger are there in “First Reformed,” just under the surface calm. You may not appreciate the direction it goes, ultimately, or make the leap alongside the story’s protagonist, played by Ethan Hawke, at the unnerving close of a carefully calibrated crisis of faith. But it’s a beautiful crisis to witness, and to argue with internally.
Schrader keeps the film, set in upstate New York, visually close to his chief inspirations. The Rev. Ernst Toller is a man at a crossroads. He tends the radically dwindling attendees of his tiny Dutch Reformed church outside Albany, down the road from its parent establishment, the thriving megachurch known as Abundant Life.
Like the isolated man of faith in Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” (1951), Toller has embarked on a yearlong experiment of keeping a journal for his private confessions, doubts and prayers. Early in the film Toller is visited by Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant parishioner married to a fierce environmental activist (Philip Ettinger) recently returned to town, and utterly adrift. With climate change raging, unchecked, he does not see the point of bringing a child into the world. The early, artfully sustained scene between the husband and the minister is pretty amazing, slipping in bits of exposition (we learn of Toller’s son, a casualty of the Iraq war; Toller himself is a former military chaplain) while Toller murmurs to us in voice-over about the ecstatic thrill of having his beliefs and ideology questioned, tested, probed.
That storyline intersects with an imminent celebration. The church, now primarily a tourist attraction, is turning 250 years old. For its re-consecration, a parade of dignitaries is being arranged by Abundant Life’s spiritual leader (Cedric Kyles, aka Cedric the Entertainer). There’s a shadowy figure of power in the background, a petroleum executive (Michael Gaston) who donates mightily to the megachurch.
Hawke has never been better. I’ve found much of his screen work mannered and overeager, in both drama and comedy, but here all is lean, and unvarnished, and thoughtfully compelling. Seyfried and Kyles are exemplary, maintaining a tone of quiet gentleness even when their hearts are breaking a little for the man of the cloth in their midst.
For such a deliberate exercise in a specific, methodical style, “First Reformed” is oddly bracing, full of unresolved, contradictory, vital ideas. The answers it provides hardly apply to the general flock, so to speak. But a spiritual inquiry can only care so much about the general audience. It’s too busy trying to work things out for itself.
MOVIE REVIEW
“First Reformed”
Grade: B+
Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried and Cedric the Entertainer. Directed by Paul Schrader.
Rated R for some disturbing violent images. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 53 minutes.
Bottom line: An act of spiritual inquiry
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