Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

First Reformed

Director Paul Schrader (Mishima) is a provocateur and he always excites. In his latest “First Reformed,” a kind of tribute to Robert Bresson’s “Diary of A Country Priest,” Schrader is spare and lyrical with not one shot out of place.

Ethan Hawke is Rev. Toller, a Protestant minister who desperately tries to hold on to his religion and his conscience, feeling besieged on all sides. From the start, Toller is a traumatized man. We learn that he sent his son to the Iraq War and that he died as a result. Toller became a man of the cloth, delegated to the oldest historic church in Albany County. Day in and day out he is treated as petty, a mere figurehead to a museum, little more than a ceramic souvenir at the church gift shop.

This eats at him from the inside out. One day, Toller is approached by young Mary (Amanda Seyfried) who says she is worried about the stability of her environmentalist husband (Philip Ettinger). Toller agrees to see him and the reverend is almost immediately captivated.

As in Bresson’s film, this variation unfolds as a horror film without corporeal ghosts. The church itself comes out of a fog and in the close-up detail of its battered wood frame you half expect a crazed monk to burst through the door. Instead of screams all is silent.
Toller tries to tell the impassioned idealist that God indeed has a plan, but the husband, named Michael (after the archangel soldier), isn’t buying it.

During the day, Toller works outside and goes a doctor for worrisome news. Mary tells the Reverend that Michael is dangerous. Toller isolates himself. He is also pursued by Esther (Victoria Hill) and on a particularly bad day, he is repulsed by her.

Toller is pecked at so much that at times the film seems an exercise in black humor. Whenever the man tries to act in seriousness, he is shot down, either patronized by CEO Balq, peppered with idiotic jokes by tourists or badgered by the mega-church pastor (Cedric “The Entertainer” Kyles in his first dramatic role).

Though some might feel a bit put upon by cues to Schrader’s “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” this is deliberate and Hawke has never been better. Just when the actor seems to veer into camp, Hawke pulls it back with intensity and feeling that turns the story from cinema kitsch into pathos. The symbolically named characters will no doubt addle (there was an actual Ernst Toller, a German playwright who committed suicide), but this device is as much a sly nod to Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” as an homage to Bresson. If you are tolerant, prepare to be provoked, teased and rapt in attention throughout.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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