First Reformed

Like Reverend Toller’s diary, this film is Paul Schrader’s form of prayer. It’s an attempt to find meaning, purpose and integrity in our fallen world. Our religion has been compromised by worldiness, our faith engulfed by despair. 

Its religious core is Thomas Merton’s insight: despair and hope are equally valid, indeed interdependent visions. Wisdom inheres in the ability to hold two such contrary ideas in the mind at the same time. Either without the other is incomplete, inadequate, futile.

Like the green activist Michael (an echo of the avenging angel), Reverend Toller’s idealism leads to paralysis by despair. Toller can’t rebut Michael’s arguments about man’s abandonment of nature, of God in His world. He can only repeat Michael’s question; “Can God forgive us for what we have done to His world?” 

Toller is himself guilt-ridden for having sent his son off to death in the Iraq war. That broke Toller’s marriage, his self-respect and his faith. Because of his feeling of futility, when Michael’s wife Mary comes for help Toller’s first impulse is to refer her to the more affluent super church nearby. Her persistence and Michael’s suicide reawaken Toller’s passion for God. But now it’s in the form of trying to protect His creation instead of the formalities of the church. Toller’s plan to blow himself up at the church’s reconsecration is his personal reconsecration to the proper service of God, to try saving His world from its corrupt abusers. 

The plot chronicles the reverend’s progression from mechanically serving his dying church to rediscovering the proper function of religion — compassion and love. 

His brief affair with (the faithful) Esther only stirred his lust, which he now admits he despises both in her and in himself. His feelings for Mary (the pure) grow slowly and more profoundly. Planning to sacrifice himself at his church’s reconsecration, he demands she stay away. Her appearance aborts his plan because he can’t inflict on her another sacrifice, his suicide after her husband’s.  

Toller’s and Mary’s love develops across two scenes of intense physical engagement There he assumes Michael’s mission both politically and personally, in environmentalism and in his relationship with Mary. That combination is religion. Toller becomes the avenger Michael.

In the first he obliges her request to replay her and Michael’s Magical Mystery Tour. She lies flat on him on the floor, arms and hands extended so their bodies touch as much as they can, their eyes locked and moving together as they breathe together. 

The sexual potential of that posture instead turns into a transcendental vision. They float off the floor, soar through the world into heaven (at least, the starry skies) — but then back into the sordid evidence of man’s ruin of God’s creation. That experience inspires Toller’s obsessive resolve to sacrifice himself in protest against the world’s corruption. 

Their full union occurs when she comes to him from the reconsecration ceremony he is missing. Their clench and kiss overwhelm both. He has just wrapped himself in barbed wire, to atone for his dashed resolve. He bleeds through his vestments. In that act he assumes the function of Jesus, suffering himself for the sins of mankind. But at the appearance of Mary he turns himself instead into Michael. in the woman for whom he first felt compassion and whose tragic loss he both shared and assuaged, Toller finds his full religious service — love. 

At that point the film just stops. The end is shocking. It seems incomplete — indeed like the end of the last episode of that other American epic of contemporary secular calvary, The Sopranos. Is there a technical problem here? we instinctively ask.

But of course that is Schrader’s point. The couple’s realized love is all either needs. The proper service to God is to mankind. The most compelling faith is human love. With that they can confront their despair, their faith and connection deepened, and stand to defend God’s world against corrupt and corrupting man. 

Schrader stops the film without the comfort of a standard ending because its proper ending lies in us. As Toller accepted Michael’s mission, his passes on to us. 

That’s the point of Michael’s funeral requests. Instead of the traditional hymn —such as the one Esther sings so archly, so unconnectedly — Toller grants Michael’s request for a Neil Young ecology hymn. Love and reverence need an active voice.

The film shares Toller’s asceticism. Like his stark, sparsely finished quarters, the film is stripped down. The classic square screen proportion is a harsh shrinkage of our more familiar widescreen. The buildings are flat, symmetrical, stern frames. Most scenes are stripped of colour and the relief of any music, other than what the characters bring the scene. 

Toller’s self-loathing leads to his Calvinist church’s self-denial. His breakfast is an apparent gruel, spiked with whiskey, scooped up in hunks of bread. A break into a sushi dinner proves a revelation of what life he is missing.  

For all the film’s asceticism, though, poetry abounds. Toller declines Michael’s offer of a drink, not because he’s not “a drinking man” but because he’s a drinking priest — and ”It doesn’t help.” Pouring Pepto into his scotch produces a shot of a swirl of pollution where the values of purity and survival seem mutually and inextricably compromised. 

Toller’s physical suffering fleshes out his spiritual. He has a cancer. His painful and bleeding urination evokes the constipated Martin Luther’s composed eruption. His plumbing is shot, as we learn from his leaking hot water faucet, his plugged toilet and his own vomiting. This motif confirms the tension in man’s amphibian nature, a troubled soul lumbered with a troubling body, the holy grounded in the secular.

The hero’s name evokes John Donne’s reflection on the bell announcing another death: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” This reverend is our toller. 

In its intelligence, high seriousness, emotional effect and quality of realization I’d call this the best American feature film of the year. Okay, so far. 

It is also disturbingly but bracingly timely. Released into the days of thousands of imprisoned children, slandered immigrants, betrayed asylum seekers, a burgeoning fascism, a corporate stranglehold on the government, the suicidal EPA and the tragically compromised religious Right, this film strikes straight to the heart.