“Writer-director Paul Schrader has made a career out of writing (Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ) and directing (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Patty Hearst, Cat People) challenging, unforgiving movies about desperate souls on the outside, looking in at a world of fulfillment, of connection, of purpose, the attainment of which they always seem to fall short. With First Reformed, he breathes life into what amounts to a career summation, a crystallization of obsessions and themes of redemption and the shortcomings of belief, and among an often brutal oeuvre I think he’s finally made a film which could be accurately described as exquisite, without betraying any of the rage and paranoia and unsettled psychological terrain that has earmarked both his finest and even his most flawed work. That word “exquisite” should in no way imply preciousness, as if anyone describing Schrader’s work could ever make room for that adjective. First Reformed is a tormented consideration of faith (and the lack thereof), the difficult possibility of transcendence, and the seemingly even more difficult act of holding ostensibly opposed impulses of hope and despair in balance without completely losing one's shit.
“Which, of course, makes it a perfect piece with Schrader’s long-expressed vision and a perfect movie for our particular moment. First Reformed speaks to the faithful in terms of what even the faithless see directly in front of them. Ethan Hawke’s tortured pastor counsels the husband of a parishioner who is despondent over the dire implications of climate change, and the transference of that burden of responsibility from counseled to counsellor addresses one of the pastor’s central spiritual crises, a profound insecurity over whether God can ever forgive us for what we’ve done, on both global and intimately personal levels. Schrader has crafted a brilliantly sustained act of tension between the spiritual and the corporeal (and the influence of each on the other), which inexorably builds toward an act of desperate release, of a man trying to make a mark on the world, on his own soul.
“The movie moves toward what seems like the emotional fulfillment of a career’s-worth of concerns given flesh which, in movies like American Gigolo and Hardcore, have often felt chilly and academic rather than truly embodied. Hawke’s pastor, exiled within his own doubt and overseeing a historically significant house of worship made into a sparsely attended tourist trap under the stewardship of a corporate-style megachurch, truly is God's lonely man.
“There have been complaints that Schrader borrows too heavily from Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, another examination of an existential crisis of faith and the hollow church where God seems to no longer dwell, in working his way through First Reformed’s winter-scarred psychological landscape, and to these ears those grumblings sound a lot like the accusations often raised against Brian De Palma as being a facile Hitchcock copycat. Like De Palma, Schrader visits the perspectives of another visionary, but he’s hardly a shallow mimic picking over the corpses of Bergman’s greatest hits. In First Reformed he’s synthesized his own obsessions into a style that seems graced by Bergman, but in the shattering end something uniquely his own emerges, slouching toward upstate New York to be born.
“Of all of Schrader's most personal work, including Taxi Driver (with which it also shares stylistic devices and a suffocating sense of isolation derived from transcendental filmmakers like Robert Bresson) this film seems Schrader’s most piercing, the one that hurts the most, the one that offers the possibility of mortification and the bearable weight of an earthly yoke in equal measure as penance for divine deliverance.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
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