Paul Schrader is one of America's best film-makers and it is sad that this needs to be said, since he is forever overshadowed and on the margins of his collaborators in Taxi Driver, despite the great influence his films have had since his debut Blue Collar.
First Reformed is of course a magnificent work, but it is more than that. See some film-makers are not content with making masterpieces, i.e. a safe film that easily compels awe and admiration from audiences about its technique, subject, and style. They are interested in going deeper, darker, and challenging the viewer's beliefs and prejudices.
First Reformed is just that kind of film. It's a movie whose true subject and attitude can be easily mistaken and slotted in binary terms, i.e. "real/unreal", "religious/secular", "pro-terrorist/pro-hippie". What the film achieves is something on another level, not beyond it, i.e. not a manufactured third-way or a Golden Mean Fallacy, but something truly ambiguous and personal.
The ending of First Reformed which I won't spoil for instance can be seen multiple ways. But what makes it shocking is that if you see the ending as hopeful or redemptive it's still depressing about what it implies about the state of the world. That there really is no way out, no way of opposing true moral and environmental degradation, and that there is no possibility of a future.
It is a film about an ir-resolvable conflict that ends on irressolution, not manufactured or fake, but true ir-resolution.
Ethan Hawke gives the performance of his lifetime, as does Amanda Seyfried, and even Cedric the Entertainer. The key moment is the conversation between the two pastors about "What Would God Have Us Do" about climate change, and the shocking moment is when Cedric argues that God did drown the world once before in the time of Noah...the way it is said, not cynically, not sophistically but plainly conveys far better than any post-apocalyptic Gaia's Vengeance fantasies about the true horror and dread about the environment.
Film Beautiful Despair
Paul Schrader is one of America's best film-makers and it is sad that this needs to be said, since he is forever overshadowed and on the margins of his collaborators in Taxi Driver, despite the great influence his films have had since his debut Blue Collar.
First Reformed is of course a magnificent work, but it is more than that. See some film-makers are not content with making masterpieces, i.e. a safe film that easily compels awe and admiration from audiences about its technique, subject, and style. They are interested in going deeper, darker, and challenging the viewer's beliefs and prejudices.
First Reformed is just that kind of film. It's a movie whose true subject and attitude can be easily mistaken and slotted in binary terms, i.e. "real/unreal", "religious/secular", "pro-terrorist/pro-hippie". What the film achieves is something on another level, not beyond it, i.e. not a manufactured third-way or a Golden Mean Fallacy, but something truly ambiguous and personal.
The ending of First Reformed which I won't spoil for instance can be seen multiple ways. But what makes it shocking is that if you see the ending as hopeful or redemptive it's still depressing about what it implies about the state of the world. That there really is no way out, no way of opposing true moral and environmental degradation, and that there is no possibility of a future.
It is a film about an ir-resolvable conflict that ends on irressolution, not manufactured or fake, but true ir-resolution.
Ethan Hawke gives the performance of his lifetime, as does Amanda Seyfried, and even Cedric the Entertainer. The key moment is the conversation between the two pastors about "What Would God Have Us Do" about climate change, and the shocking moment is when Cedric argues that God did drown the world once before in the time of Noah...the way it is said, not cynically, not sophistically but plainly conveys far better than any post-apocalyptic Gaia's Vengeance fantasies about the true horror and dread about the environment.