(https://i.imgur.com/LSHXi9c.jpg)
Reverend Ernst Toller (Hawke) is a solitary, middle-aged parish pastor at a small Dutch Reform church in upstate New York on the cusp of celebrating its 250th anniversary. Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church now is a tourist attraction catering to a dwindling congregation, eclipsed by its nearby parent church, Abundant Life, with its state-of-the-art facilities and 5,000-strong flock. When a pregnant parishioner (Amanda Seyfried) asks Toller to counsel her husband, a radical environmentalist, the clergyman finds himself plunged into his own tormented past, and equally despairing future, until he finds redemption in an act of grandiose violence.Written and Directed by Paul Schrader
Starring Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried
Release Date - May 18, 2018
i want to see it yeah
Classic Schrader material. His choices as of late have been fucking wild so I'm intrigued by this ostensible return to form.
a buddy saw this at a festival and sung its praise. said it's by far schrader's best and the best movie he saw last year. looks like his version of diary of a country priest. probably the film i'm looking forward to most.
powerful, admirably unhinged and unmitigated in its bleakness. i'm not sure that this is actually transcendental so much as schrader aping the aesthetic that he literally wrote the book on, frenetically, lovingly, but also frivolously tipping his cap to the practitioners of said style, but not necessarily achieving what he purports is its purpose. it plays like a tarantino film for the likes of bresson, bergman, dreyer, and tarkovsky (i really didn't see much ozu here). so i found myself at odds with the forced asceticism, especially as the film moved towards where it ends up. still, against today's standards and what cinema has become, this is as austere as one can reasonably expect, i guess.
this is a profoundly angry film, a damning study of christian/religious pathology and a death knell for humanity. there's also this (skip to 03:16):
very good. wanted to like this more. i suspect i'm overly precious about the films and filmmakers that can be categorized as transcendental, and can't help but view this as somewhat slight by comparison.
This was one of the most powerful, emotional experiences I have had with a film in some time. Every last strand of loss and ache and disillusionment that permeated this story went really deep for me. There's a long, breathtaking scene of dialogue near the beginning that not only sets up who Hawke's Reverand Toller is, ultimately urging him onto the increasingly psychologically fraught path he treads throughout the film, but also serves as an aggressive reminder of what a fucking incredible writer Schrader is.
This really hit home (literally, it takes place just outside my hometown.) I feel fairly certain I won't see a better American film this year.
Best of the year so far for me. I was hanging on every shot.
This is my favorite of the year so far and doesn't strike a false note...
NOT REALLY SPOILERS
...until the last 2 minutes of the movie when it strikes an entirely false note. It's kind of a major bummer for a movie that had been so controlled and assured to fall flat on its face at the finish line, but it didn't entirely ruin the experience for me. Just dinged it from a B+ to a B-.
MAJOR SPOILS
It's not even that I needed the super-bleak ending for the film to work, it's just that the way the barbed wire and the camera swirl were executed felt like it was out of a different movie. The makeup didn't work, the score, it just felt forced and like he wasn't sure about it. Which is such a bummer because when they lay on top of each other earlier, I thought that levitation was incred.
Quote from: modage on July 31, 2018, 12:01:55 PM
This is my favorite of the year so far and doesn't strike a false note...
NOT REALLY SPOILERS
...until the last 2 minutes of the movie when it strikes an entirely false note. It's kind of a major bummer for a movie that had been so controlled and assured to fall flat on its face at the finish line, but it didn't entirely ruin the experience for me. Just dinged it from a B+ to a B-.
But even without that false note, and being your favorite of the year, you'd still only rate it a B+?
Yeah I have not been super impressed with movies in 2018.
Agree pretty much exactly with Modage's take.
A beautiful, timely, furious movie that sadly loses its grip by the end. I love several of Shrader's films ("Auto Focus" maybe most of all, despite its relative obscurity), but it's become more and more apparent that he's just not a good director. Every film is an intellectual exercise in copping the feel of a director his critical mind digs, and while there have been plenty of incredible writers without a visual style (I'm looking at you Mankiewicz) I can't think of any who so shamelessly jump from imitation to imitation. Shouldn't have listened to the commentary, which reinforced that the entirety of his visual ideas boils down to, "so and so did this, I'm gonna try it on for size". Would've been such a better film if his script was helmed by someone who could occasionally free themselves from their reference points.
As much as I've come to admire Ethan Hawk, I wanted to believe his descent far more than I did. Not sure he works as well as I wanted him to.
Blah blah. I also agree that with the shape of movies in 2018, it was an incredible admirable near miss for me.
It worked perfectly for me. I was devastated/enraptured by the end. 100% perfect to my eyes and senses at large, not a single flat note.
Horses for courses.
I was surprised at how bad I found this movie to be after reading all the good things said about it here. I thought it was amateurish and silly and poorly crafted. The movie seems like it's been assembled from the pale shadowed fragments of many other better movies. Every scene is so trite and unoriginal. Even the levitation scene, which I agree is its high-point, feels familiar -- we've seen this same thing many times before. This movie really has nothing new or interesting to say at all.
That's not even getting into Schrader's directing. He's just not very good at it. He has such a heavy hand, and lacks self-assuredness and cinematic vision. And the guy cant direct actors for shit. Every interaction is so clunky and unnatural. Amanda Seyfried's performance was distractingly awful and I dont think it was really her fault. Almost everyone was pretty bad in this. But hats off to Cedric the Entertainer who was, surprisingly, the only character that managed to come across as a believable human being.
Hard to disagree with most comments and reviews. I've often wondered how would a film like Winter Light look and feel in today's world, and I guess I got my answer now.
But Schrader is not a mere imitator, perhaps unwillingly. He may wish to do a full homage/rip off of Bresson and Ozu and all of those guys he admires, but he's a profane motherfucker also, and one of the most fascinating things about the film is watch those two almost opposite energies crash into each other.
Ethan Hawke is a revelation, even considering how great he has been over the years and how much he has improved exponentially recently. This is easily his crowning performance, a masterclass of restraint and subtlety. That scene at the beginning between him and the activist is just wild with nothing but containment in every aspect of acting, writing and directing.
Fantastic film.
Script (http://a24awards.com/film/firstreformed/FIRST_REFORMED_script.pdf)
of course the ending made perfect sense. or rather, it wouldn't have been a thematically complete movie without the ending. it's a positive movie in that regard. i'm still more into Taxi Driver really, which i think is an overall darker movie. it's not that global warming doesn't concern me i've just never contemplated suicide because of it. that doesn't strike me as helpful. and personally i'm not really counting on love in my life. so the movie doesn't really go in the directions of my thoughts. but i can't imagine a tidier package of a movie about the thoughts expressed in this movie, and it calmed me as movies about reckless nerves calm me.
it's not that new dimensions open unto me through my memories of First Reformed, it's that i like remembering First Reformed. Scorsese says he's smart but Schrader is an intellectual. anyone not truly an intellectual can spot an intellectual. what i mean is it really is a different type of thinking. and Schrader shows miraculous narrative form, time and again
the narrative catalyst for the priest's misery comes from the death of his son, which was initiated by his own idea, and resulted in the end of his marriage. except that is what the narrative mentions, and really the supreme question is did his misery begin with his own birth--did his misery begin when his life began. after the suicide in the woods the policeman mentions the suicider's dad being morose and it being in the blood. i can't remember everything the priest says about his family. but anyway my point is a series of disasters culminate in the ending, but were disasters the problem or was he?
he was the problem, of course he was. his boss mentions this, during an internet-famous discussion scene, in which his boss swivels his chair. his boss says the priest spends all his time in the garden meditating and he needs to open himself to the rest of the world. this is true. the boss mentions traveling to other places, this is a good idea. his boss puts him down actually, saying he's only a priest at a church no one attends and is really a tourist spot, that's a bad idea, saying that to someone, is a bad idea, so mean, really, on a pathway to being helpful but damn. and the chair swivel: brutal.
love is the end for the priest--it's what takes him out of his garden--but what will that love mean and does it change who he is, that's a good question, but what we're looking at now is not the woman who's pregnant and single since her husband suicided, we're looking at the woman who loved the priest without him being able to love her, in fact he was spiteful to her, and blamed her for bringing him down, he was seeking someone who would lift him--and ahh what an illusion that is, ahh how the ending does not suggest permanence. love is real but for how long, and was a lack of love ever the real problem...
Finally saw this film. Loved it. Along with You Were Never Really Here and Sorry to Bother You, a call to direct action but also a reminder to love, which is hopefully the catalyst for your actions.
I do read the end as a delusion; I see no end or solution to the despair. *whistling*
I think that's a totally fair assessment, however, just for my heart, I need to believe the ending literally happened. I just need it.
Quote from: Drenk on January 23, 2019, 07:24:08 AM
I do read the end as a delusion; I see no end or solution to the despair. *whistling*
If the ending is a delusion, then obviously death is the end/solution to the despair, no?
I'm not overly up on transcendental stuff as much as most cineastes. Seen my fair share, just have yet to take a deep dive on the style. As long as you've seen one of each, Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, I think you're in the clear. First Reformed truly lives up to the hype of a bleak, timely masterstroke of an artist who has been gearing up for this release his entire career. Schrader's voice here is so powerfully intimate, his trembling rage so vociferously damning, you're smacked into reminder of this man's shattering talent. Hawke slays the role, one akin to a pious Travis Bickle. You feel his pain through every facial contortion, his soul and faith as concaved as his cheekbones. Maybe a bit too much Winter Light meets Diary of a Country Priest, but a riff is a riff, and when riffed by Schrader it's all good.
I think the ending happened, too, in spite of its creator's interpretation. I see it as more redemptive than was probably intended.