Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Catching Up: "First Reformed"

 ½ 

In a small, historic church in upstate New York, which was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, pastor Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) conducts services for a half-dozen or so parishioners. His heart does not seem in it, but since losing his son in Iraq and watching his marriage crumble, his heart doesn't seem in anything.

He is filled with doubt. He does not even trust his own thoughts. He writes them down in a journal, and promises himself to be completely honest, to write everything he thinks, to scratch out nothing and to tell his story truthfully.  Occasionally, he tears pages out of his journal and burns them.

There is nothing he can trust. He recites the prayers (though admits he himself cannot pray) and speaks kindly to the people who visit the church -- "the souvenir shop," as it's become known to its owners, a mega-church that seats 5,000 people -- but he does not have kind thoughts.  He also knows he is dying.  If you were to bring that up with him, he would probably sigh and say, "Everyone is dying," but the blood in his urine and the pain from his stomach, which leaves him doubled over and retching into the toilet, means he is dying faster than others.

Death does not mean much to him. He sees and contemplates it all the time, and it brings no answers, no closure, it just ... is. First Reformed is about a man who has retreated so far within himself that even his search for God feels empty and meaningless.  It is best for him to think about nothing, which is largely what he does.

Then, he meets a young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried), who is married to a deeply troubled man (Philip Ettinger). They are both environmental activists, though really it's only the husband who takes the activism part seriously. And he takes it very seriously. Mary is pregnant and her husband wants her to have an abortion. His reasoning is that the world has been ruined; the science is real, the data incontrovertible -- the planet has been damaged, maybe irreversibly, so how could you possibly bring a child into that world?  Would that child ever be able to forgive you?

And then, to Ernst, the question arrives with more force: Can God forgive us for what we've done to His creation?

Mary's husband seems to make valid points. Ernst, who lives up to the German translation of his name with vigor, becomes alive during the conversation, which he calls "exhilarating." The passion and conviction of Mary's husband are like nothing he has seen in a very long time.

And then, something shocking happens, something that sends the film reeling in another direction altogether, and begins, slowly, to shake Ernst awake from the stupor in which he's been living. Increasingly he is scared of the words he writes in his journal. He cannot be honest, because his version of honesty was one in which he was examining his previous self. First Reformed examines the moment in which a man becomes different than he was before.

Then, in one of the most unexpected moments in recent movie memory, Ernst is visited by Mary and together they have what might be termed an out-of-body experience. She calls it the "Magical Mystery Tour," and it is deeply physical but it is not sexual. This is not a movie about sex, it is a movie about, if anything, why people even bother with things like sex and love and hope. The very act of connecting with Mary opens Ernst's mind to a deeper truth, one her husband and she have been trying to tell him.

The movie veers tonally, artistically and narratively into a new direction by trying to depict what this awakening must feel like for Ernst, how it makes him feel like he is floating on air, how he suddenly sees the way things are connected.

Already, Ernst has been placed in an uncomfortable position of having to defend the very faith he has been doubting: A big anniversary event is coming up for the church he runs, and it's sponsored by the company that was so bitterly opposed by Mary's husband and his fellow activists.  What Ernst has not yet learned is that the man's death has left an opportunity to oppose this company in a way that is shocking and disturbing, and as Ernst explores this unlikely chance, First Reformed starts making some deeply uncomfortable observations about religion, faith and conviction.

Those questions lead it to an ending that is shocking for both its content and its abruptness. Very likely, you will come to the end of First Reformed and feel cheated, or at the very least confused. You may look at the screen and give a slight "Hmpf."

There are, it appears, cinematic precedents for First Reformed, and writer-director Paul Schrader, who also wrote disturbing and complicated films like Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, was inspired by a specific form of filmmaking called the "transcendental style" (about which he wrote a famous book) and by specific films by directors like Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson. That is interesting to a certain segment of the filmgoing population, but what is important in the end is not whether you understand the origins of First Reformed but what you see on screen.

What is there is haunting, troubling, hypnotic and, there's no doubt about it, puzzling. But its central question of whether God can forgive his own creations for destroying what he has designed has remarkable relevance, and opens up a fascinating story of one man's realization that trying to answer the question can have impossibly fearsome consequences.





Viewed December 11, 2018

VOD










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