OVP: First Reformed (2018)

Film: First Reformed (2018)
Stars: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill, Philip Ettinger
Director: Paul Schrader
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I do not need my films to be pleasant.  I think one of the complaints I frequently get from people when I discuss a film is "I don't want to be depressed for two hours" or "I want to escape" and while that apparently isn't actually true (if it was, you wouldn't be watching SVU or Game of Thrones as depression will surely hit after a while), it's a preconceived notion for movies, and one that I don't share.  I don't mind if a film goes to the recesses of a man's soul, tries to find the light, and comes back empty-handed.  That said, even I can struggle on occasion with something black as tar, and this is what happened as I watched Paul Schrader's powerful, but bleak First Reformed, a film that focuses on one man's struggle with god and the environment around him.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on Ernst Toller (Hawke), a pastor at a small, historical church that is 250 years old and was once a leg of the Underground Railroad.  Though it is still a functioning church, it exists mostly as a tourist attraction at this point, something for people to invite into their lives only fleetingly, and then leave behind, buried in their cameras.  One day a young woman named Mary (Seyfried) seeks his counsel, as she is worried about her husband Michael's (Ettinger) obsession with climate change and the worsening environment, and how no one seems to be taking this threat seriously.  Michael eventually commits suicide in the woods, his angst for the environment too much for him to bare, and slowly Pastor Toller takes up his cause, as well as his obsession.

The film unfolds almost entirely through meditation, with even individual conversations with people like Mary and Michael seeming to be out-of-touch with reality, Pastor Toller retreating into his own head for a conversation about the conversation.  It's a risky idea, to have a main character who forgets the subjects around him, but it's something that Schrader, who has made a career of writing about flawed, ego-driven men (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Affliction) can navigate well.  The madness that Hawke feels is real, and Schrader doesn't shy away from it.  He also makes it hauntingly relatable, at least at the start, with Toller feeling a helplessness about climate change we all have experienced at some point when reading about the seemingly unsolvable subject.

But of course Toller takes action in a dramatic way that we would not (it is a movie, after all), eventually deciding after a stomach cancer diagnosis that his life must mean something more, and decides to bomb the church, coming out as a dying Jesus figure equipped with barbed wire, trying to kill an industrialist who is destroying the local upstate New York environment.  The movie moves somewhere into a dream sequence, with him nearly committing suicide (despite already likely being dead), and then embracing Amanda Seyfried.  It's kind of a cop out answer to the larger question, but Schrader's script & Hawke's performance are so succinct and strong you can't really fault the ending.  The movie is good, but it's also almost impossible to watch, feeling at times like a very realistic car crash video.  I left desperately needing a hug, and wanting to know if Schrader simply has no hope for humanity, or if there was some lesson to be gleaned from Pastor Toller's hardened road.  The film doesn't give us those answers, and as a result I'm going with 3 stars, because while it's well-done, it's also not a film I enjoyed viewing from nearly any angle.