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.
Lewis On Film 