First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)

Ethan Hawke in First Reformed

Toller: Ethan Hawke
Mary: Amanda Seyfried
Jeffers: Cedric the Entertainer
Esther: Victoria Hill
Michael: Philip Ettinger
Balq: Michael Gaston

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan
Production design: Grace Yun
Film editing: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Music: Brian Williams

"Derivative" is a much-overused word in film criticism: Everything comes from something else, and even the film praised as "original" is eventually going to reveal its sources. So it's not a knock on Paul Schrader's First Reformed that it feels so strongly influenced by the directors Schrader wrote about in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. What directors haven't been influenced by them, or at least had to acknowledge that the intensity and commitment of their work suffers in comparison? The resemblance to Ozu's work is purely stylistic in First Reformed: a spareness and stillness of image, sometimes even a sense of claustrophobia in Schrader's determined use of the so-called "Academy ratio," the 1:37:1 frame familiar to us from movies made before widescreen technique became common to moviemaking. A more direct borrowing comes from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) whose title character has intestinal torments that are reflected in those of Schrader's upstate New York priest, Toller. And the spectrum of religious faith, from non-belief to obsession, exhibited by Schrader's characters is found among the characters of Dreyer's Ordet (1955). But the film that seems to have most directly influenced Schrader is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), whose ailing, doubt-ridden pastor finds himself unable to prevent a troubled member of his congregation from committing suicide. There are times when Schrader's cinematographer, Alexander Dynan, even seems to be copying the setups of Bergman's, Sven Nykvist: Both, for example, give us views of the preachers facing out upon chilly, nearly empty sanctuaries, backed up by the emblems of the faith they barely cling to. If anything, Schrader's film is a kind of updated version of Winter Light; in First Reformed the existential dread of the times is no longer annihilation by nuclear warfare but instead the uncertainly looming cataclysm of climate change. Schrader of course goes beyond mere time-shifting: Ethan Hawke's Toller is not just a latter-day version of Gunnar Björnstrand's Tomas Ericsson, but a contemporary man with contemporary problems like dealing with the clammy hold that corporate capitalism has on his church, in the form of Michael Gaston's Balq and the toadying Jeffers, the preacher for a "prosperity Gospel"-style megachurch, surprisingly played by Cedric the Entertainer. And Toller finds ways to console the widow of the man who commits suicide that might have shocked Ericsson. This is the point at which derivativeness becomes a virtue in Schrader's film, when we can superimpose Bergman's vision of faith onto our own, more than half a century later. There are moments when Schrader's film seems to miss the mark and slip over into mere thriller-movie melodrama, particularly the introduction of ecoterrorism in the form of a suicide vest, so that we miss the maturity with which filmmakers like Bergman and Bresson and Dreyer resolved their characters' spiritual crises. But Hawke, in a performance that is more assured and sensitive than any I've seen him give, holds the film together admirably.