First Reformed (2017)
Dir. Paul Schrader
As cliche as it may be, I find myself yet again entranced by an installation of the “full Mishima” and “God’s lonely men” genre of film. So of course I need to go on a diatribe about it.
I feel now as I did when I finished Silence (2016). I grapple with my relationship with religion and spirituality often, and films like this tend to exacerbate that turmoil—not always in an unwelcome way, though. In life, you come across people that turn to religion when in dire need of meaning. This film, however, felt like it rejected that to a certain degree which I found really interesting. Ethan Hawke’s character, a reverend, could not have been more distanced from his sense of self. An understanding of his own pain is completely lost on him. He is obsessed with rooting out his pride, but in an attempt to do so indulges in it. The character’s desperation to find the very same meaning that his congregants turn to him for in itself is a contradiction that he neglects. He is just as lost as the people that look to him for guidance.
Schrader paints this reverend’s life in as bleak and austere of a manner as possible, and in that revealing an apathy towards it.
Throughout the movie, the reverend indulges in a steady destruction of his own body. It felt as though the existentialism of environmental catastrophe worked as a metaphor for his own self-harm. It was his way, in the spiritual sense, to inflict the pain of the world on oneself. To feel so lost in the desolation of one’s surroundings that the only option seems to be angling that destruction inward. Schrader posits this as a vain, self-pitying act in the haze of prideful inebriation. But as soon as the tortured reverend finds meaning beyond this despair, he abandons nihilism for an unobstructed passion for that new sense of purpose. More or less a distraction from the despair that grew to consume him for so long.
All of that to say, I found this perspective on faith, despair, grief, pride, and all the other things this film explores so directly to be uniquely compelling. the thematic arc Schrader's work has taken is so impressively meaningful. I still have a lot to process after watching this—I don’t think it will leave me for some time. Glad to have watched another film that makes me think. I love movies. Thank you Paul Schrader.