First Reformed

Reverend Toller, Ethan Hawke’s forlorn character in First Reformed, is terrible at his job. From the pulpit, Toller reads the scripture in a hesitant monotone, as if he’s reading the fine print for a credit card. The handful of attendees in the pews have only blank stares. We see Toller’s point-of-view. There’s a hopelessness to the way director/screenwriter Paul Schrader shoots these in-church scenes, the opposite of religious ecstasy.

From Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, Schrader seems to take only the skeletal form of his story: a small town clergyman confronts the meaninglessness of daily suffering. (I found more interesting parallels with the John Updike novel A Month of Sundays.) But Schrader, frankly, is more mischievous than his hero Robert Bresson. Where Bresson searched for transcendence amid the banal harshness of existence, Schrader’s work seems to accept the harshness, finding transcendence in perversity.

Toller’s haunted past and deteriorating health manifest in the permanently wrinkled brow and dumbfounded gaze. Hawke’s performance, which is quiet and subtle, is of a man who is constantly made most uncomfortable by the familiar, the the things that should bring a preacher peace — scripture, prayer, so-called fellowship. He seems to always be being swallowed by the furniture in which he sits.

We learn that Toller’s son died in Iraq, which contributed to his divorce. We learn he likely is dying of cancer, and we watch the pink stream of his bloody urine. He drinks. He carries on a relationship with a church lady named Esther (Victoria Hill), whose heart he breaks.

Schrader’s story, which is slow, with many scenes playing out in real time, depicts despair leading to desperation leading to extremism. Hawke’s voiceover in which he reads brooding diary entries almost make it feel slower. Toller counsels one of the flock, the husband of Mary (Amanda Seyfried), Michael (Philip Ettinger). Michael is a zealous environmentalist with obvious psychiatric problems. He doesn’t want to bring a child into a dying planet. Mary is afraid he will kill their unborn child. Toller gives him some spiritual claptrap about having perspective amid “the darkness.” He says pretty much what you’d expect a man of the cloth to say and gets pretty much the results you’d expect.

Toller is a servant in the religious sense and in the literal sense. His tiny church is underwritten by a neighboring five-thousand-seat megachurch skippered by Reverend Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer). That church is itself underwritten by a local industrial polluter named Ed Balq (Michael Gaston). The existential angst of feeling small and powerless amid the chaos is exacerbated by Toller being, in fact, small and powerless amid the chaos until the film’s stupefying conclusion.

First Reformed — FOUR STARS

Rated R

Directed by Paul Schrader

A24

Killer Films

Omeira Studio Partners

Fibonacci Films

Arclight Films

Big Indie Productions

113 min.

Twin Peaks: The Return

(This post discusses plot details of Twin Peaks.)

After the eighteen hours of cinematic dreamscapes, red herrings, and nostalgia that was Twin Peaks: The Return (A.K.A., Twin Peaks: Season Three), what sticks in the memory as much as anything is the humor. For those of us addicted to the mythos of the original series and David Lynch’s masterpiece about trauma and suffering Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch’s capacity to mix in farcical humor into a bizarro eighteen-hour tone poem is pure feel-good medicine. The constant shifting in tone and narrative focus — from horrific violence to farce to the avant-garde beauty of Part Eight — put us in a position of wonder, never knowing what’s coming next episode to episode, scene to scene, moment to moment. One does not watch Twin Peaks so much as live inside it for a while, sometimes eager to leave and sometimes begging to stay.

The secret to episodic television is to keep people tuning in next week, get them on the hook with cliffhangers and intrigue. Lynch and Mark Frost created their own counter-intuitive recipe for achieving this. Had the entire series been dumped on us all at once by a streaming service, it would not have been the cinephile event it became. The discussions, arguments, memes, and speculative Reddit threads in between episodes — the beautiful community of perplexed admirers of the show, in other words — usually something to be avoided, was something here to be relished. We needed the two-week breather after the tour de force of Part Eight. And it turned out to be a slick move on Showtime’s part (the original series aired on ABC) to give us the first two episodes and the last two episodes in savory, two-hour gulps.

A lot has changed in Twin Peaks since 1990 (Lynch’s prequel about the death of Laura Palmer, Fire Walk With Me, was released in 1992; Season Three picks up twenty-five years later). What once was an idyllic small town almost obnoxious in its quaintness now has (at times) literal vibrations of menace. The town, one might say, is electric with bad behavior. The murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was remarkable because of the juxtaposition with the place in which it happened. “People don’t get murdered here” we learn in Season One.

Twenty-five years later, everyone is older, some are sick, dying, or already dead (a fact that exists both as a narrative reality and as Lynch’s nod to actors who’ve died since 1990 or since the production of Season Three wrapped). Now it seems the kids are all on drugs, particularly a scary drug called “Sparkle,” and there are more townspeople who seem decrepit, fed up, even psychotic. Yet there’s a goodness that seems to permeate certain people and places in town. Note Carl Rodd, played by the recently deceased Harry Dean Stanton, once a shady and ornery presence in Fire Walk With Me, who has softened into a kind-hearted old man who chuckles at his 75-year smoking habit and hands his neighbors money so they won’t have to donate blood.

The experience of watching The Return is similar to that if its main character, Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), who has spent the past twenty-five years in the Lodge and must re-enter our world. We too feel disoriented. But Coop’s re-entry is a complicated affair that lasts all season. In a world of doppelgangers, the “good” Coop finds himself inhabiting the body of a compulsive gambler and cad named Douglas Jones. (Where the real Dougie went is forever an issue for the Reddit threads.) Dougie/Coop exists as a catatonic giant baby. His family and coworkers don’t seem to bat an eye, raising questions about the personality of the “real” Dougie. MacLachlan’s performance as Dougie, who wins at slot machines and solves mysteries without really trying, is the best thing the 58 year-old leading man has ever done.

Dougie gets things right by accident, and Coop is inside there, somewhere, fixating on tokens that remind him of his F.B.I. past — the statue of a lawman outside of Dougie’s workplace, the badge of a security, and, of course, coffee. Meanwhile, Mr. C/ Evil Coop (also MacLachlan) is the opposite of Coop, a villain whose villainous aims are at first opaque. We wait all season for Good Coop and Bad Coop to converge in Twin Peaks, Washington. While they make their way there, the plot constantly tosses new characters and soap opera story-lines in our laps, each one its own juicy slice-of-underworld life. Even characters who end up being extremely minor, such as Ashley Judd’s Beverly, are given a home life of angst and some kind of internal struggle. Set across no fewer than three locations across the country, our long cast of characters seem headed for each other, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, more like destiny.

The eighteen hour film (to me, it’s absolutely the best film of the year, and by a country mile) takes its time in a way unheard of on television, sometimes purposely alienating the average T.V. viewer. (Just watch Part Eight.) Lynch’s coy direction and command of tone has never been better. But these things get judged by the end-game. When we think of the Sopranos, many think of what their opinion was of the finale.

The Return is the most appropriate, perfectly surprising-yet-inevitable ending to a complex and sprawling story that we’ve ever witnessed on television. Coop, finally awake, takes charge, finding his way back to Twin Peaks to fight both Evil Coop and BOB, the Black Lodge entity responsible for everything from the murder of Laura Palmer to every other act of cruelty in Twin Peaks. With his former associates and new friends, Coop destroys BOB. (Coop does a lot of standing around when this happens in the penultimate episode, watching as other less capable characters do the heavy lifting.) Part 17, in a sense, is the ending of the major narrative. Evil is vanquished, heroes redeemed. Lynch and Frost, however, know that that’s not enough.

Part 18, then, is not about Coop and Laura as much as it’s about our feelings about the show. Twin Peaks has always been about suffering, trauma, and the longing we all have to make sense from senselessness. We’ve learned in Part Eight that BOB has a surprisingly terrestrial origin, one that links the folly of mankind in the modern era to the presence of a certain kind of evil in the world, the kind that entails bad things happening to good people. Coop travels through time and space to save Laura. Somehow, her murder never happens — we see her wrapped-in-plastic body disappear from the famous shot in the series pilot — but in doing so, Laura never existed in the first place, now taking on a different identity as “Carrie Page.” Coop’s “saving” of Laura hits a cosmic reset button that erases not just Laura but also everything. Coop’s behavior in the finale is curious, more stern and distant, more uncaring, more like Mr. C. The virtuous F.B.I. agent we’ve come to love finds that there are no saviors, no perfect worlds — perhaps no “real” worlds at all, merely endless possibilities. We realize this at the exact same moment he does.

Twin Peaks: The Return — FOUR STARS

Directed by David Lynch

Rancho Rosa Partnership Production

Lynch/Frost Productions

Showtime

18 episodes, 50-60 minutes each