10 / 10
First Reformed is the best film Paul Schrader has made since he wrote Taxi Driver, and it’s the quietest. Ethan Hawke gives the performance of his career as a minister whose faith is being eaten from the inside.
Schrader wrote and directed it in 2017 and was nominated for the Oscar for the screenplay. It’s a 10.
The Premise
Ernst Toller runs First Reformed, a small historic church upstate that gets a handful of worshippers and a lot of tourists. He’s a former military chaplain whose son died in Iraq, and he’s drinking, ill and keeping a journal he plans to burn. A pregnant parishioner asks him to counsel her husband, an environmental activist in despair about the future, and that conversation sets everything after it in motion.
The Hawke Performance
Hawke is extraordinary. He plays Toller as a man performing calm for other people while something collapses behind his eyes. He’s polite, thoughtful and gradually terrifying, and the film never gives him a big scene to explain himself.
The Schrader Theological Structure
Schrader has written about the transcendental style in film for fifty years, and here he finally uses it. The camera barely moves. Shots are square and still. There’s almost no music. That restraint makes small things, a hand on a shoulder, a glass of whisky poured into Pepto-Bismol, land like blows.
Cedric Kyles plays the head of the megachurch that funds Toller’s, a practical man who thinks grief is a scheduling problem, and their arguments about what a church is for are the film’s spine.
The Closing Sequence
I won’t describe the last five minutes. They go somewhere no realistic film has any right to go, and people walk out arguing about whether what they’ve seen is real, imagined or something else. I think Schrader means it as grace, and I think he leaves it open on purpose.
The Weight of It
It’s a film about despair, in a man trained to counsel other people through it, and it treats that despair seriously instead of using it as a plot engine. Amanda Seyfried is very good as the widow who becomes the one thing keeping him here.
Craft Note
Craft Note
First Reformed uses a journal as its spine, and the discipline of the form does the work. Toller writes plainly every day, and the gap between what he writes and what he does becomes the story.
A diary structure lets a character be candid and unreliable at the same time.
Is First Reformed as good as people say?
Yes. It’s a 10, and it’s demanding. It’s slow, still and heavy, and Hawke’s performance is one of the best of the century so far.
Frequently Asked Questions
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