Ethan Hawke stars in this film that masterfully connects the existential struggles of an individual (Hawke as Reverend Ernst Toller) with the global threat to human existence posed by climate change.
Toller, pastor of a small Dutch Reformed church in upstate New York, is asked by a young local woman, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), to counsel her husband Michael, whose radical environmental beliefs have led him into trouble before, and who now apparently contemplates martyrdom, as evidenced by the suicide vest Mary discovers in their garage.
While counseling Michael, Toller seems to find in these environmental concerns, with their disconnect between what we know to be right, and how we behave, a correlative to the disjunction in his own life between the model person that he wearily apes as a minister, and the alcoholic, lost man that he is in private.
A.O. Scott, writing his New York Times review of the film, incisively captures the underlying source of Toller’s anxiety:
“First Reformed” feels like a horror movie, which in some ways it is. The source of the terror, though, is not a supernatural presence but a metaphysical absence. A poem by Robert Lowell records an 18th-century preacher’s feeling that “the breath of God had carried out a planned and sensible withdrawal from this land,” leaving His creatures to their own infernal devices. Toller stares into the same abyss.
Toller’s internal struggles are accelerated by the impending Reconsecration of his church, which has become little more than a picturesque tourist stop, historically notable as a former stop on the Underground Railway, but spiritually irrelevant, and mostly devoid of parishoners on Sundays. The Reconsecration, led by Reverend Joel Jeffers (Cedric Kyles) of the nearby megachurch Abundant Life, promises to cement the irrelevance of First Reformed by incorporating it into the swelling tide of evangelical meliorism.
Toller’s dying First Reformed church, set against the successful Abundant Life church, and the easy platitudes of Jeffers, is an obvious and telling contrast. Toller understands where the danger lies; prosperity, in this film, is a form of blindness, the evidence of Jesus’ teaching that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.
But the deeper complexity, the one that Scott’s review alludes to, comes from the emptiness in modern life, the awareness that we have stepped into a secular abyss that no longer offers any possible solutions. During the scene in which Michael’s ashes are scattered, a choir of youthful climate activists chant tunelessly, excoriating “big oil.” The lyrics are as platitudinous as any of Jeffers’ reassurances. One feels clearly the loss of a transcendant aspect.
The basic question that Toller seems to be struggling with is whether man can know the mind of God. His genuine efforts to understand the answer to this question are undercut by the contemporary world, which has adopted what is essentially a human-centered religion, one which creates its own norms and values, and then attributes them to God.
In this world, Edward Baiq (Michael Gaston) , the big oil executive who dismisses climate change as “complicated,” and erupts at Toller because he wants to take “political” stances, is the personification of the approach our society takes to quell those who would question materialism. In this camp, doubt is the greatest weakness, and greed, masked by the shiny trappings of worldly success, is the greatest good.
While Toller apparently finds an escape from his own personal hell in his relationship with Mary, there’s no comparable solution to the environmental destruction Michael foretold. As in Beatriz at Dinner, another powerful recent film with an environmental theme, self-immolation is shown as a tempting recourse for the protagonist; when society seems beyond reform, is the best option to give one’s life in an example of the ultimate resistance?