Paul Schrader's 'slow' transcendental drama FIRST REFORMED w/ Ethan Hawke

Rolled my eyes at the dippy Magical Mystery sequence, and I have questions about the ending (mostly I'm disappointed in Schrader's unwillingness to see the political implications of his story to the very end; see Alfred's linked review upthread for a far better elucidation of this than I can provide) but otherwise this was fantastic. Beautifully filmed, with perfectly tuned dialogue and performances; I don't anticipate seeing Hawke take home an Oscar for this next year, but I'll still be pissed about it. By far the better of the two recent de facto Taxi Driver remakes--I'm in the minority on Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here, but I'm right with the critical consensus on this one.

Man, this just felt so on the nose to me. Gorgeous to watch, but it all felt so telegraphed and didactic. Sure, influenced by Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman, Tarkovsky, but their faith-crisis films have depths and complexities I didn’t feel here. Nothing against E.H., he’s good in the role.

I realize I’m in the minority, and I respect the movie and I believe it speaks to some people. Just not to me.

The didacticism is part of the point, imo: the film stays steady in its view of the world, patiently waiting for Hawke to catch up with it.

I'll buy that it's intentional, it just struck me as overdetermined. Like a movie made from a kit. "Priest whose son died in an unjust war" "Pregnant woman named Mary" "Chekhov's suicide vest" etc.

The didacticism is part of the point

I'll buy that it's intentional, it just struck me as overdetermined. Like a movie made from a kit. "Priest whose son died in an unjust war" "Pregnant woman named Mary" "Chekhov's suic

I'll buy that it's intentional, it just struck me as overdetermined. Like a movie made from a kit. "Priest whose son died in an unjust war" "Pregnant woman named Mary" "Chekhov's suicide vest" etc.

Some insight:

A24 podcast: This Is How It Should End with Paul Schrader & Sofia Coppola

this was excellent

favorite shot was the peptol bismol bloom in the whiskey

What a triumph! I felt the need to note down some thoughts, though they echo a lot of what's already been said. (Massive spoilers ahead)

First Reformed is a film about mutuality and the benefits and dangers therein. In this light, scenes were often redolent of the therapeutic encounter, with Hawke's Reverend Toller as tentative analyst, watchful of his own and others' seductive influence as ghosts converge on his resolve and render his capacity for rational thought less and less reliable. It is equally about a retreat from the shared into the illusory safety of the self. It catalyses our contemporary environmental struggle through the personal demons of one man, forming a chilling precipitate. Will God forgive us? What is repressed collective guilt over the destruction of the planet capable of doing to society?

"There's just no middle ground with these kids. Everything is so extreme", complains Toller about halfway through the film. Pastor Jeffers counters that such a position brings young people a feeling of comforting certainty in the face of fear. It is nonetheless Hawke's own inability to fuse the light and the dark into a healthy harmony that leads to his extremism as the film unfolds and he is further plagued with a disguised guilt over his son's death (reawakened by the suicide of Mary's husband) that gets split off into the moral certainty he feels over seeking vengeance on environmental criminals.

The final resolution for all Schrader's cinematic (and performative) asceticism is still fraught with paradox, in which the most cathartic ending for the audience would also have been the most reprehensible. First Reformed is reminiscent of Mishima throughout: the inconsequentialness of figures silhouetted and superseded by buildings and landscapes that belong to different timelines, the sublimely hysterical skies, the stoic mania and masochism of enforced boundaries, the intoxicating descent into fanaticism... There's even the same build to a suicidal resolution, complete with shaving and meticulous dressing ritual...except this time there's the charge and retreat, broken by a single human connection, which, tenuous and ambivalent as it may be, hints at the hopefulness of shared lives as something to cling to and not destroy. A holding vessel into which all the persecutory anxieties of the film's duration can be poured in hopes of salvation; the aforementioned bloom of heartful pink to neutralise the acid; the dyad floating across a blissful and dreadful nospace. A reminder of choice and the powers of retaining connectivity in the light of darkness.

well said

that was lovely tt

i also saw this and defer to tt's superior analysis; mine was just going to be some variant of 'i spent the last 40 minutes in profound panic, i'm still shaking now, film of the year'

Interesting interview with Ethan Hawke.

Almost watched this last night on Amazon. I'm definitely gonna get to it soon.

I re-watched it last night on Amazon and -- well, "enjoyed" doesn't suit the material, but the last thirty minutes were clearer in intention. That first conversation between Toller and the environmental loony is impressively paced.

lotsa good stuff here, from Kael's dictatorial status in the '70s to the ending of FR...

[What we’re discussing is] part of the larger question of the de-fraction of culture. The fact that there’s no center. There’s no Johnny Carson, there’s no Walter Cronkite, there’s no Bruce Springsteen. There’s no fucking center to popular culture. The atrium where everyone would get together to talk is now dozens of little rooms.

So back in the ’60s and ’70s, if you wanted to talk about the culture, and what was happening around us, you were going to have to talk about Bonnie and Clyde. Or The Wild Bunch. That was part of the conversation. And so, if you look back through that period, almost every week something came out that would give a critic a bone to chew on. If it had substance in it, you know. It’s taken 50 years for those opposed to the counterculture to finally win. To make sure that 1969 could never happen again.

And of course, we could talk for days about the cowboy atmosphere we’re in now. Nothing we’ve learned in the last 100 years is of much value. We don’t know what a movie is anymore. We don’t know how long it is, we don’t know where you see it, we don’t know how you monetize it. What if it’s a net series? That is half hours, or 15 minutes. What if it’s 115 minutes, you know? That’s still a movie, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Mad Men is a movie — a 79-hour movie.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/01/paul-schrader-in-conversation.html

Yeah, it's a good interview. I'm glad he mentioned Light Sleeper, rarely cited among his best.

Well … I’ve seen Diary of a Country Priest a few times, you know?
Yeah, but it’s the main character from Country Priest, it’s the setting from Winter Light, it’s the ending from Ordet, it’s the levitation from The Sacrifice and it’s all wrapped together with the barbed wire of Taxi Driver.

I wish you never told me that. One of the things I really like about the movie is that it’s really sufficiently updated to now.
But, it’s a mistake when you think that any of us do anything new. All we do is reassemble our montages. If you reassemble in an interesting enough way, it will become something new. What I added — which I didn’t quite realize while I was making the film, I realized in the editing — was the monomaniacal obsession of Taxi Driver. The other films don’t have that. The editor said to me in the editing room, “You know, there’s a lot of Taxi Driver in this film.” And I said, “Yeah, I know, I put it in there.” He said, “No, no. There’s not a little, there’s a lot.” And I started to realize that it had gotten infused with that same thought pattern I used 45 years before. Because I thought I was making a slow movie. And I first screened it for people and I said, “I warned you, this is a slow movie. It’s going to take its time, don’t rush it.” Then afterward someone said, “That’s not a slow movie.”

loved this

Why was he so prissy about being told? The influences are obvious.

It's Schrader listing the influences, not the interviewer!

Great stuff

uh that's what I meant -- why was the interviewer so prissy about it? It's not like it's a secret.

I guess they wanted to match crank with crank, except Schrader only pretends to be a crank?

the interviewer also insisted first reformed was a remake of diary of a country priest before that which i thought was pretty silly

schrader's a good interview bc a few of these questions are dead-enders and he still manages to answer them with substance or at least substantial related anecdotes. you can tell he was/is a critic, i'm really into that

Film Comment:

“WILL GOD FORGIVE US?” asks Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (of Ethan Hawke’s Oscar snub). Schrader’s newly announced film sounds like another exercise in the transcendental, described by the filmmaker as being: “Basically, if you took a script from 1956 that Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott, and you asked Terry Malick and David Lynch to come in and take a shit on the script, you would have the movie I’m making.”

FIRST REFORMED (2018)

⛪️

😕⛪️

👱🏻‍♀️👋🏻

😕⛪️

👱🏻‍♀️💬🧔🏻=😩

😕⛪️

😕👋🏻🧔🏻

🧔🏻👉🏻📉

🧔🏻💬🏭

🧔🏻💬🌍🌡

🧔🏻💬🔥🌍🔥

😕

😕🥃

😕👋🏻👨🏾

👨🏾💬⛪️+$=👌🏻

😕

🧔🏻📱

🧔🏻💀

😕

👨🏾👉🏽💵

😕🥃

😕🥃🥃

😕💡!

😕💣⛪️

👱🏻‍♀️👋🏻

🍆🧞‍♂️

— Eric Allen Hatch (@ericallenhatch) August 28, 2018

I finally got my girlfriend to watch this with me over the weekend. I had seen it before, but so long ago that I remembered little beyond the final sequence and the superfund site. She had a completely different interpretation of the ending, and now I'm wondering how many other people share that interpretation. (She thought Reverend Toller drank the poison, and Mary's appearance was not a miraculous rescue but a vision in death, alluded to earlier in the film when Toller tries to imagine the dead man's final thoughts.)

Basically I think her take is right

yeah that's how I interpreted it when I watched

same

As much as I think I generally prefer Schrader as a director to Scorsese, he doesn't have the deftness to sustain doubt as Scorsese did doing the same thing at the end of Taxi Driver

It honestly would never have occurred to me to doubt the image I am presented with. I don't find anything in the film up to that point which supports the idea of an "unreliable camera" (and that includes the earlier levitation sequence, which I felt was a depiction of a genuine miracle, rather than some sort of "now we are inside his head" thing)

I mean, maybe

I've also never seen Taxi Driver so I don't have that point of reference.

(But weirdly, in that one old Smog song where he sings "47 pushups / In a winter rates seaside motel / I feel like Travis Bickle / I'm listening to Highway to Hell," I feel like I understand exactly what he means?)

It honestly would never have occurred to me to doubt the image I am presented with. I don't find anything in the film up to that point which supports the idea of an "unreliable camera" (and that includes the earlier levitation sequence, which I felt was a depiction of a genuine miracle, rather than some sort of "now we are inside his head" thing)

by that logic, the camera was reliable during the scene he drank the poison.

Well, yes, because there is no scene where Toller drinks poison*. We see him fill a glass and lift it, and then we see him stop with the glass nowhere near his face when he notices something off screen. He looks frozen when we cut away from him, and he does not appear to have moved when we cut back to him a second later. And, while the camera is placed far enough to make it difficult to see the contents of the glass after this cutaway, it is not hard at all to see the glittering arc of liquid that flies from the glass when Toller lets it drop to the floor, if one looks for it, as I did a minute ago.

*Of course, alcohol is poison; and the sushi he ate in the fancy restaurant was probably loaded with mercury; so in the long wrong he is just as fucked as the rest of us.

I'm starting to see some mental contortions at work at this point

Well I did have to find the remote so I could pull the movie up again and jump to the scene in question, but I wouldn't exactly call it "work"