“Paul Schrader once had Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver narrate, ‘I’m God’s lonely man.’ Throughout his career as screenwriter and director, that description could apply to so many Schrader protagonists. Schrader then took this characterization a step further by making his lonely man a man of God going through a crisis in faith. Ethan Hawke as First Reformed’s Reverend Ernst Toller falls into a long line of Schrader male archetypes but Hawke’s performance brings something different. Toller is lost but his path towards righteousness is welcomed in ways that other Schrader characters never felt watching before.
“Toller starts from the bottom. Hawke’s boyish features and physical characteristics as a young Reverend marked with personal tragedy add to the sense of impotence and demureness of his character. His alienation when occupying the spaces of faith, be it the corporate mausoleum megachurch or the living, or rather embalmed, museum of the First Reformed Church, is palpably expressed by Hawke in his body language by feeling enclosed and dwarfed by the structures around him. Toller is a deeply wounded man who feels imposed by the troubled world and failed institutions, having to answer for a God when he too increasingly feels less in touch with. But there is a switch.
“Hawke’s Toller does become galvanized when injustice when a troubled man leads him to discover his church’s major donor is an area industrialist who happens to be one of the world’s biggest polluters. There is a spark in Toller’s steps and while he is still this frail man weakened by poor health, there is a different energy to him that Hawke presents in the way he journals and uses First Reformed Church for visitors. One such scene is is him being open with a smile and glee, immersed in showing young school children on a field trip that First Reformed Church was once a place of justice, presenting a hidden door in the church that helped escaped slaves hide during the Underground Railroad. Toller feels less alone in that moment and in turn, so alive. Hawke shows Toller as empowered by the past and traditions of his church and faith. Reverend Toller and First Reformed Church are both imperfect, weakened vessels through Schrader’s film, but Hawke enlivens both in his performance, by becoming a man with purpose. Ethan Hawke makes faith in First Reformed be more than words and action, but a force that reshapes all the senses and spaces that surround Reverend Ernst Toller.” ~ Caden Mark Gardner
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