FIRST REFORMED ***1/2
Paul Schrader
2018
IDEA: A reverend begins to question his faith in the world after he meets a radical environmental activist.
BLURB: A searingly
intimate witnessing of one man’s anguished prayer and crucible; a jeremiad
wrestling with a sermon; a rumination in perpetual twilight solitude; First Reformed creates an experience of
ascetic contemplation in which questions of faith, responsibility, and morality
are put on ruthless trial. Shot in the constricted Academy ratio in mostly muted
wintry tones and with an emphasis on minimalist, geometric space, Schrader’s film
is marked by a severe perceptual austerity that effectively underscores the stark
anxieties and obsessive thought patterns such questions foster. For Ethan
Hawke’s tortured Rev. Toller, the questioning itself, the spiritual inquiry and
guidance that form his very bedrock, becomes an act of increasingly destructive
self-flagellation exacerbated by the series of undeniable existential threats
he is forced to confront. What is the role of religion in a contemporary world
corrupted by commerce and ideological extremism? How can one respect God and
his creations and accept man’s systematic despoliation of the planet? How does
one maintain hope in the face of such pervasive darkness? Through multiple,
soul-searching discourses, Schrader sets up a tonally complex dialectic that
bristles with intermingled outrage, skepticism, ambivalence, and intellectual
frisson. The film is grim, but not nihilistic; despairing but also, in its
breathtaking denouement, inspired by the possibilities of salvation and
renewal. As a state-of-the-world lament, First
Reformed can occasionally feel reactionary, especially when it comes to its
monocular first-person male perspective. But Schrader is too smart to localize
the problem, and too humane to welcome the apocalypse. His film is a nuanced,
agonized tract that still manages to arrive at something resembling catharsis.
