“First Reformed” - Impressions
Part 1: Seeing the film through my eyes
Dan McDonald
This essay is a story of my
interaction with the movie “First Reformed.” How I consider the movie doesn’t
necessarily indicate how you will see it. “No two people see the same movie”.
Each of us brings our own perspectives into the theater and into the film. For
me seeing “First Reformed” awakened thoughts of my favorite theater’s history,
and of a neighborhood through which I pass on my way to the theater.
On my way to the theater I pass
through a neighborhood of what was likely working class homes built after the
First World War. The houses are quite small by today’s standards. The
neighborhood seems as I pass through it to be something of a scene from the
movie “The Outsiders.” That shouldn’t necessarily since S.E. Hinton wrote the
novel when she was attending high school only a couple of miles from this
neighborhood and others like it. Paul Schrader’s film tells the story of a man being
pushed close to the mental breaking point. In the Outsiders, rival gangs from
different sides of the poor and the affluent divide, are resisting their own
differing perceptions of pressure. Pony Boy understands this after Cherry
describes how there is a lot of pressure for kids being told that they must
succeed. Sometimes the pressure placed upon them to succeed seems to have
little correlation with their life dreams. They simply must succeed whatever
that means. Pony Boy, who lives in one of these antiquated houses, in
neighborhoods of people who have seldom been successful in other’s or their own
eyes felt the pressure of living in a place where everyone thought that no one
in these parts ever amounts to anything. Place and the overall community
expectations doesn’t mean everything about how we will respond to life, but it
does mean more than we would admit when we say you can be anything you want to
be. Perhaps it needs to be said, but how easily can it be heard? There are
times when a message is needed that will provide a way for someone to stand
against the pressures crushing his soul. In the Outsiders one could imagine
Pony Boy’s life would have “stay gold” written over all that he would do in the
future. The Outsiders and First Reformed are not even similar movies, but they
both deal with the struggle of facing down pressure in our lives. I think
driving through a neighborhood that reminds me of the Outsiders helped me to
see the images of a person struggling with what life had given to him.
The place I think of as my theater originally opened 90 years
ago in July 1928. It’s ninetieth birthday will soon have a number of events to
celebrate its history. The history of the theater and the neighborhood where it
exists is a history that has included flourishing, floundering, and simply
looking for equilibrium instead of boom and bust. In 1928 the theater opened
its doors in an area which was then the city’s busiest business area outside of
the city’s downtown district. The theater and surrounding business district was
in easy walking distance from the recently built Route 66 highway. The mother
road as it has been dubbed by a historian of the road became a sort of main
street for every town through which it passed from Chicago to Los Angeles. The
theater in this new business district was a place where all the newest
Hollywood movies could be seen. Route 66
gave birth to many business districts, but she was a fickle mother, who often
changed paths and left the children she mothered abandoned. That is what
happened when the route moved ten blocks south. New business areas started
growing along the new pathway. In a few more years the interstate system was
built bypassing the old road altogether, and it wasn’t thought important to
provide an exit ramp leading to the dying business area. In a few years the
theater stood amidst empty buildings where busy stores had once thrived. Few
people came to the theater in the dying place. The cinema that once showed the
latest Hollywood fare now advertised adult entertainment and triple-x movies.
Then even that business model closed its doors and the theater joined the empty
storefront buildings in being boarded up with “no trespassing signs.”
Eventually someone who loved old theaters and fine movies decided that maybe
this was the spot where one could remodel the old theater and establish it with
to serve a different niche market. It would be a locally owned non-profit
independent arts house theater. The area is in something of a renaissance with
a mix of businesses discovering the old buildings in search for entrepreneurs,
and the Spanish community with its barrios kind of existence within our culture.
It is a curious mix of English speaking arts community side by side with the Mexican-American
community. The upcoming celebration of 90 years of cinema history finds the
cinema in the same place but different world than where it has stood for so
many years.
In “First Reformed” the focus is
upon a church about to celebrate its 250th anniversary celebration.
The church has a small number of people in its actual congregation. Without
some help from a mega church existing elsewhere in Albany County, it would be
hard to imagine the congregation being able to financially carry the load of
both paying for an old building’s maintenance and a pastor’s salary. There is a
deep connection to the past and the church seems in its worship and in what its
small membership seems to appreciate to be continuing mostly because “this is
the way church was when I grew up.” Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) has a working
relationship with the bigger church across town that offers a smorgasbord of
opportunities for service and worship in comparison with the traditional way of
First Reformed. Pastor Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer) is the pastor of the
bigger church and he is providing the leadership for the coming celebration of
the old church’s 250th anniversary. It may be First Reformed’s
anniversary but Pastor Jeffers wants to make sure his mega church doesn’t
suffer from a poorly planned or prepared celebration. Reverend Toller seems
sometimes to be as much a museum curate as a church pastor. It is a difficult
place to thrive if you are a somewhat morose man who often experiences regular
bouts with depression.
As First Reformed prepares itself
for the important 250th anniversary, Reverend Toller as museum
curate is explaining to children on a tour of the church how the church was a
participant in an activist role in matters in the course of American history.
Pastor Toller finds himself challenged by his present distance from activism,
while museum curate Toller can happily describe the activism.
History can sometimes linger over a
place. There is one story I love to tell about my favorite theater in my city.
If you look from the outside of the building you might see windows on a second
story in the old theater building. There were apartments above the theater in
those early boom days for the theater and the surrounding community. I like to
imagine someone living in those apartments, looking out her window as people
started lining up on the street below to see the latest movie. Sometimes she
walks out of her apartment, makes her way down the second floor hallway, and
then down the stairwell, soon to be joining the customers buying tickets for
the movie. Maybe she dreams of one day being in one of those movies. The
audience will be there to see her and she will be performing the role as well
as she can for them. In my little story of the gal from the upstairs apartment
the magic of that upstairs apartment creates a miracle. The young woman goes to
Hollywood and is cast to play a lead role. The audiences come to see her. She
impresses the critics, and she wins best actress of the year. The thing is, Jennifer
Jones starred as Bernadette in “The song of Bernadette” in 1943. Jennifer Jones
was awarded the Academy award as Best actress for her performance. Only a few
years before that happened she had been living in an apartment above the Tulsa
theater that had been built in 1928. The magic had really happened.
History can be romantic. Happy
endings are something we love. But a small congregation having a hard time
paying its bills, reliant on the kindness of another congregation – could with
little difficulty become a place where people feel as if they are the outsiders
destined to live in buildings that become empty and in communities where no one
expects you to amount to much anymore. There could be a sense of abandonment or
betrayal that the path which seemed to be offering abundance now seemed only to
deliver frustration. The pressures of being in such a place could be immense
especially for an earnest but sullen leader of the church. This could all go so
wrong or perhaps there would be a miracle moment when the message to “stay gold”
sounded out loud and clear and gave hope in a difficult setting. History can be
romantic and it can be tragic. Who knows which way a hard day will be
completed.
