Reform Put in Place

In the run-up to the Oscar nominations, one movie that was showing up on a lot of critics' "best of the year" lists was First Reformed. None of the prognosticators expected it to make the Best Picture cut, but it was widely assumed that star Ethan Hawke was a shoo-in for a Best Actor nod. I've always enjoyed Hawke (and the movies he chooses to be in), so this was a film I put in my queue, and watched the weekend just before the nominations were released.

First Reformed is the story of Reverend Toller, a priest at a small, old New England church. It's a "tourist" church, kept open for its history and the visitors who come to see it more than for its meager congregation. It's the perfect assignment for Toller, as his troubled past has shaken his faith and left him a half-hearted minister at best. But now one of his few parishioners is in crisis. The rising threat of climate change has driven Michael Mensana into deep despair. His wife Mary is pregnant, and it seems unconscionable to him to bring a child into a doomed world. Mary hopes that Toller can counsel him. But despair, it turns out, is infectious...

Ethan Hawke did not, in fact, receive an Oscar nomination for this role -- an omission many critics have said was the biggest "snub" of this year's Awards. But the screenplay did pick up the first career nomination for writer-director Paul Schrader, whose work with Martin Scorsese (on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ) had somehow not managed to do so. (After Spike Lee's directing nomination for BlacKkKlansman, this was the other big "Finally!" nomination of the year.)

It's a shame Hawke was overlooked, though, because this movie either sinks or swims by the efforts of the actor playing Reverend Toller. This story is a real trial for this character, a repeated beating down of his faith to see how long he can maintain a veneer of spiritual strength. It makes for an unexpectedly tense story in places; you wouldn't necessarily expect a quiet internal struggle to be the stuff of suspense, but the final act is one long, drawn out tease: "What's he going to do?"

If only either the performance or the script was going to get Oscar recognition, then I'd say they got it backwards. Hawke does plenty to let you see inside the mind of his character, more than Schrader's script seemed to expect an actor could reveal without "help." I found the script a bit on the nose at times, overly explicit. It seems to underline, highlight, and circle every key moment just in case we might not track where Toller is at in his gradual descent. We get it.

I'm also not too enamored of the ending. The final act is really building to a binary decision, then tries to get clever with a third option. It's far less provocative than at least one of the two obvious choices would have been -- obvious in this case would not have been bad. The third way is an artsy ending, an ending that seems like it might be "open to interpretation" -- but a moment's consideration is all you need to realize that there's really only one interpretation that makes any sense.

I wasn't the biggest fan of Schrader's directing either -- or, at least, his decision to film the movie in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This is the size of television "back in the day," and feels like exactly the wrong choice for the subject matter here. This is a story in which climate change and the impending global disaster it threatens is a key element. This formatting of the image makes the movie look decades old, like an old relic to be regarded at an intellectual distance.

But the movie did carry me along for most of the journey. It kept me engaged despite the constant visual remove and the ending I questioned. So overall, I did enjoy it and would recommend it. I give First Reformed a B. If you're the sort of person who likes catching up on Oscar movies, you should put this one on your list, even though it did miss the race for the top prize.