It’s no surprise that Paul Schrader’s film about a crisis of faith should include a suicide vest, barbed wire and a bottle of Drano. Schrader is the writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. He both wrote and directed The Comfort of Strangers, Light Sleeper and Affliction. None of these are for the faint of heart, and neither is First Reformed.
Schrader opens First Reformed with a straight on shot of a 250-year old Dutch Reformed church. It’s white and symmetrical; the steeple shoots into the air – aiming for heaven. Most of the film is shot in a squared off style. It’s even filmed in the rarely-used Academy Ratio, which is closer to square than the wide screen formats. The camera rarely moves; the lines are rigid horizontals and verticals, which fits both the church and its minister, the Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke).
The church and the Rev. Toller are in trouble. Toller preaches to maybe eight or 10 faithful’; most of the churchgoers in this upstate New York town go to the mega church next door, which in fact owns and runs the little church as a curiosity. Toller lives a life as spare and joyless as his building. His feet echo as he walks across his bare antique wooden floors. He eats his meager dinner from one lonely bowl at a small table in a bleak room; his bed looks neat and trim and unoccupied; four books are piled rigidly on a night table. You can bet that none of them are comedies. He also drinks.
The mega church is run by a hefty African-American (Cedric Kyles), who presents his religion with lively and pragmatic common sense, and even something like wisdom.
A terrible event – Toller takes it as a personal failure -- sets him into his downward spiral. Toller’s overriding theological question is whether god can forgive humanity for destroying the environment of the Earth, and it’s a question the film takes seriously. Paul Schrader grew up in a home he describes as conservative Christian. Theology was a major force, but Rev.Toller’s questions about faith as a response to the huge problem of human misbehavior are not typical of American filmmaking.
Life has battered Toller. He lost a son to war and a wife to what followed. The preacher next door sees that Toller has retreated from life, but he doesn’t see how Paul Schrader deals with this level of self-repression. Think Travis Bickel of Taxi Driver and remember that Schrader has never given in to the force of plausibility.
The levitation sequence may be loony, but it’s also inspired. Toller spends more and more time counseling his comely young parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried). It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking, but Toller resists anything involving human feeling. Mary suggests a physical interaction that sends Toller into the heavens – although he so resists even imaginative pleasure that his journey winds up in a dump. Schrader has been asked why he did the sequence -- he said that he was stuck for what to do with the two characters, so he asked himself what the great spiritual filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, would do. The answer was to levitate.
But that ain’t the half of it. There’s still the suicide vest, barbed wire and Drano. As Tolstoy famously said, if you show a gun in the first act, it had better go off in the third. But this is not what we expect, and neither is the ending. For all the theatrics of the last third of First Reformed, the theological debate does not go away. The Earth really is in trouble, and human beings as a group seem stymied about what to do. It’s one kind of problem for secular environmentalists, but it’s another for people of faith. Years ago, Schrader said that he was raised to have the faith of a child, but not the mind of a child. First Reformed puts that notion to a test.
