The burden of faith and the torment of upholding fractured belief has marked many filmmakers, but perhaps none quite as woundingly personally as Paul Schrader, the writer behind “The Last Temptation of Christ” and director behind many searing dramas about psychic and existential affliction. Beyond a cinematic career already teeming with tortured protagonists grappling with their purpose in life, Schrader’s extremely strict Calvinist Christian Reformed Church upbringing has often manifested in the rejection of those values, exploring the perverse nature of mankind, while examining individuals struggling to stay on the right path. Schrader’s own complicated, often resentful relationship with his childhood beliefs has resulted in anguished characters such as Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” Major Charles Rane of “Rolling Thunder” or Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott), the highly devout father in “Hard Core,” who tries to rescue his daughter from the iniquitous world of pornography.
But the complex relationship with faith would also produce a deep admiration for a minimalistic, austere style of filmmaking that awakens a spiritual state of grace. Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer may have invented the form, but Schrader literally wrote the book on the transcendental style in film (1988’s “Transcendental Style in Film”), extolling the virtues of divinity realized through stasis and primacy. Which makes the 71-year-old’s latest effort, “First Reformed,” almost a statement of intent: not only is it a cinematic return to form, but a career-defining homecoming centered on a troubled clergyman with a load of bad ideas swirling around his head, delivered in a stark model of rigorous camerawork and observationally distant ascetic tendencies. Schrader was born to make this film. It’s a grim experience about the sickness of despair that echoes the corrosive psyche of “Taxi Driver,” while meeting the severe ecclesiastical setting of Bresson’s masterfully controlled “The Diary of a Country Priest.”
A terrific Ethan Hawke, in one of his greatest performances, stars as Reverend Toller, an ex-military chaplain suffering a crisis of faith, and wracked with grief over the death of his son. Through counseling a young parishioner seeking succor (a compelling Amanda Seyfried) and her radical environmentalist husband, he rediscovers his own purpose to shepherd and guide. But like a sheep lost from the flock, distressed by his church’s complicity with unscrupulous big business, the minster’s mission, told through his increasingly bleak journals, becomes a perilous and radicalized perversion of righting wrongs.
Roused by Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Ida,” and following a few years of experimenting with prurient, unsuccessful micro-budgeted indies, “First Reformed” finds Schrader galvanized with resolve and vigor. Starched with conviction, “First Reformed” feels like a lifetime of preoccupations and traumas distilled beautifully, accompanied with a haunting sparseness creating a profound deliverance. An experimental, dark ambient score by Lustmord, aka Brian Williams, a Welsh industrial musician and sound designer, is distressingly gripping, greatly assisting in the psychological transition of the priest from a solitary creature to someone more disturbed. Also, shout out to Cedric Kyle, aka Cedric The Entertainer, who delivers an extremely convincing turn as a senior minister overseeing Hawke’s historically-rich, but lowly attended church.
Yet, “First Reformed” is not without at least one sizable misstep. One scene meant to express a critically transcendent moment is marred by middling VFX and perhaps feels a little unintentionally risible. It’s not enough to damage the worthwhile picture, but it sure is unflattering.
As noted, amplifying the psychological incarceration of Hawke’s unsettled cleric is the restricted, deliberate filmmaking by Schrader with a locked-off camera. Only in a few key sequences does the apparatus purposefully betray its highly-composed form. But it’s a misnomer to describe “First Reformed” as slow cinema. Yes, there’s an emphasis on contemplative long takes and observed style, but there’s also a pulse to the dramatic narrative that riffs on “Taxi Driver,” particularly with its similarly tour-guide-ish narration through a mind plagued with doubt and pain. There’s even one almost overt nod to the famous Alka-Seltzer shot in Scorsese’s film, and a lead with a similarly aggravated stomach. Frankly, it’s nowhere near as elliptical as most slow cinema, even though the film will be an acquired taste to be sure.
Schrader’s career has spanned fifty years with extreme highs and lows, but perhaps only a filmmaker of this age could create such a profound summation of a lifetime looking at lost souls, misgivings of belief, and enslavement to sin. A highly-concentrated meditation on devotion, a sharp commentary on the moral hypocrisy of the Church, and in the end, a hopeful statement of redemption through love, “First Reformed” sees Schrader return to his roots, and through the aesthetics of grace, find his way home. [B+]
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