First Reformed ***** (2017, Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric the Entertainer) – Movie Review

Ethan Hawke gives a brilliant performance First Reformed (2017) – it must be his best so far – as the Reverend Holler, the already troubled, anguished priest of a historic tourist church with no congregation in upstate New York. He seems calm and measured, wise and sure, but he has a tormented past that he is just about able to keep a lid on, and is about to become a lot more troubled and anguished.

The rev has strong religious beliefs, which are obviously about to be powerfully challenged. As he prepares to celebrate his cute-looking church’s 250th anniversary, he meets religiously inclined parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried), who asks him to look in a help her troubled activist partner Michael (Philip Ettinger).

Now the Reverend Holler is forced to grapple with mounting despair brought on by new tragedy and worldly concerns that are sparked by the couple. It turns out that Mary is pregnant, just like Seyfried was during production.

It is an agonising story of belief, religion, faith, the Church, Christianity, ethics, man’s exploitation of the environment, the cynicism of big business, and the rapidly deteriorating state of the world. Faith, hope and God of course are all being challenged and seen being destroyed everywhere in Schrader’s film. He seems to be questioning if there is any place for it in today’s cynical, changing, declining world at all. After all, the Reverend Holler’s church is virtually void of any kind of congregation. It is just a beautiful museum piece with a lot of great history and a tourist attraction.

You don’t get many of such stories, these days, I don’t suppose you ever did, certainly not in American cinema. It is all the more remarkable when you realise it was shot in just 20 days on a $3.5 million budget.

Writer-director Paul Schrader has bitten off all the big subjects, and he proves once again a man of great wisdom as well as a very fine film director and even finer screen-writer. Let us watch and listen. Let us pay attention and heed the lesson.

Is the Reverend Holler nuts, a well-meaning deluded believer at least as deranged as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver? Or is he actually on the right path to, well what to exactly?

Schrader’s extraordinary film is a masterwork, exquisitely done, asking simple, reasonable questions in the form of an art movie. True, he makes it run like a thriller, but, if so, the thriller it is like is Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess. So it is not really a thriller at all, but it engrosses and involves like one. It is a meditation on religion, faith and the state of the world, but then so is Taxi Driver. The Calvinist Schrader is boldly looking to compare his work with that of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. He is up for it and not diminished by the comparison.

The intense, haunted-looking Seyfried gives Hawke loyal support, and Cedric Kyles (Cedric the Entertainer) is outstanding as the bishop, with Michael Gaston good as the bad guy, the environment unfriendly big businessman, ruining the world while getting rich and easing his conscience supporting the church.

First Reformed was voted Movie of the Year at the AFI Awards, USA 2019. It was nominated for three London Critics Circle Film Awards 2019, including Film of the Year, Actor of the Year and Screenwriter of the Year, and won Actor of the Year for Ethan Hawke.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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