First Reformed (2018)
Directed by Paul Schrader
A pastor of a small church in upstate New York starts to spiral out of control after a soul-shaking encounter with an unstable environmental activist and his pregnant wife.
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What critics compared First Reformed to
While First Reformed is a wrenching movie, it’s never gratuitous, and it marks an incredible return to form for an artist still best known for his screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
At last, one of the living American greats (writer of Taxi Driver, co-writer of Raging Bull, director of Hardcore and Affliction) has returned to dissect The Ways We’re Going Mad Today, in a preacher drama so dead serious — so rigorously hair-shirted — that you might guess ahead of time that it’s shot in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio.
‘Diary of a Country Priest’ meets ‘Taxi Driver’ in Paul Schrader’s brilliant, disturbing film starring Ethan Hawke as a troubled pastor trying to serve a seemingly distant God in an indifferent world.
As the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Mosquito Coast—and the writer-director of Hardcore, American Gigolo, and Affliction—Schrader has examined the despairing male illusions of power and control in a cold, indifferent universe, the blind alley of faith, and the violent lashing out that accompanies realization.
This is obviously the foundation of the unimpeachable Taxi Driver, but it also runs through his writer/director films Hardcore, Light Sleeper, and to a lesser extent American Gigolo.
In another vision, Glass stages a moment of levitation that’s at once awful and ecstatic, its own transcendental triumph while also recalling similar sequences in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed.
Instead, Glass’ thriller is spiritually rigorous, to the point where it is almost like a sequel to Paul Schrader’s towering masterpiece First Reformed .
Comparisons will made to Taxi Driver (1976) and First Reformed (2017) in the way characters start placing themselves in the savior role when one isn’t called for.
While those films contained elements of horror, Maud is more in tune with Ethan Hawke’s minister in Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” or the priests in Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” who are of a reasoned belief that leads them to horrific, or at least melodramatic, extremes.
Saint Maud , the impressive and thoroughly unnerving debut feature from British writer-director Rose Glass, is attuned to the agony and ecstasy of faith to a degree not seen since Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017).
And Clark’s performance, however vulnerable, lacks the fire in the belly that made Ethan Hawke’s similarly troubled believer so powerful in Schrader’s First Reformed .
Flanagan moves the camera in fun, showy ways from time to time — he loves tilting the camera to play with geography, and one particularly fantastical meditation evokes Paul Schrader’s First Reformed .
Over the years, I’ve looked at films like Silence, Signs and First Reformed.
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Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are the obvious inspirations (Robert De Niro even appears as "Murray Franklin," a Johnny Carson-esque late night host who gives Arthur his "big break"), but they're far from the only ones (think Fritz Lang's M and Paul Schrader's First Reformed).
Schrader even used it just last year in his fantastic Ethan Hawke-starring film, First Reformed.
And as the film’s insistence on its own profundity goes on, I find myself longing to escape into one of its more spontaneous and surprising cinematic relatives, like John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary.
Brendan Gleeson’s formidable rural Irish priest in Calvary is a recent example.
As writer/director Paul Schrader said after First Reformed lost the Best Screenplay Oscar to Green Book, "Never underestimate the power of mediocrity."
Nor is it untrodden territory for prestige cinema; in just the last few years, both Martin Scorsese’s Silence and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed have told stories about a God who goes silent.
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Paul Schrader, whose similarly themed “First Reformed” is the summer’s other major achievement, certainly has it.