Few artists are more explicitly tormented than Paul Schrader. The man most famous for writing Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, Taxi Driver, followed that with an up-and-down, decades-long career examining the spiritually lost and morally bankrupt. Schrader’s movies are severe, without humor and often contain some very excellent performances. First Reformed, his twenty-first directorial effort, feels like a culmination of everything we’ve ever received from him, a melding of themes and characters, as well as paranoias and hang-ups. It’s a modest, oftentimes bleak examination of just how difficult it is to accomplish true faith in American society, a culture losing the nuances of grace and an appreciation for the natural world.

Ethan Hawke stars as Reverand Toller, a man of faith who heads the First Reformed Church in a grey, permanently wintry part of upstate New York. First Reformed is a centuries-old congregation that has sparsely-attended services, but works mostly for prestige, a tourist-y branch of the mega-church nearby, Abundant Life, which is run by the more commercially-minded Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyles, AKA Cedric the Entertainer). Toller doesn’t mind the solitude of working in First Reformed. His own existence is dreary, but purposeful. He grieves the death of a son whose killing in the War in Iraq was preceded by Toller’s insistence that he join the military. When his son’s death led to the end of his marriage, he chose the lonely life of God. A penance and a service, few seem to grasp just how troubled Toller is.

After one service, he is approached by Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant woman who’s husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), is scaring her with his radical stances on society and its approach to climate change. Toller comes to their home, where Michael confesses despair when he thinks about bringing a child into a world he’s so convinced has been irreversibly harmed. Toller speaks calmly with Michael, but he’s shaken by the experience, both by what Michael is saying and how much his own pain and experience mirrors Michael’s. With Mary’s continuing worry, Toller tries to keep an eye on Michael’s erratic behavior, while also facilitating an upcoming celebration at First Reformed over the church’s 250th anniversary.

With failing health and a taste for hard liquor he can’t seem to kick, Toller wades through these days coming closer and closer to breakdown. His meeting with Mary and Michael is a catalyst in his thinking. His faith in God is rock solid, but his faith in humanity and their treatment of God’s creation, is disintegrating with shocking speed. He keeps a journal which is narrated by a voiceover that Hawke reads like he’s choked by cigarette smoke. In these entries, Toller details his daily struggles, both physically and mentally. He is unsettled by Michael’s cause as well as his response to it. He’s disparaged by Abundant Life’s capitalist aspirations that require him to run First Reformed like a souvenir shop. More than anything, he is disappointed by people and their seeming lack of grace.

First Reformed is one of the few Paul Schrader movies I actually liked. Like Affliction and Light Sleeper, it’s one of the few times that his maudlin concepts was matched by appropriately masterful filmmaking. The movie is presented in a boxy 1.37:1 aspect ration that creates a fierce claustrophobia throughout the film, and Schrader’s brilliant framing (shot by Alexander Dynan) and editing (cut by Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.) establishes a tension even before Hawke’s gravelly narration gives it substance. Schrader’s screenplays often end in hysterics and First Reformed is no exception. The film’s ending, which I can see being debated and dissected ad nauseum, wasn’t nearly as compelling as the rest of the film, which I could take at face value, but it does at least attempt to payoff on the film’s lofty theological ideals without some form of armageddon.

Hawke’s performance as Toller is perhaps the film’s most astonishing attribute. The actor, a mainstay in movies for thirty years, is doing things here I’ve never seen from him. Hawke has been so good in so many movies, and yet First Reformed presents us something transformative, something achingly sincere and profound. As this feels like a culmination for Schrader, I feel like it is even more so for Hawke, who has fought against his pretty boy 90’s persona and until now, had never truly extinguished it. As good as First Reformed is – and I think, outside its overwrought finale, it is quite good – I get the sense that it is only as valuable as the performance Hawke brings to it, which gives credence to Schrader’s ferocious feelings about the world as it stands today.

 

Written and Directed by Paul Schrader