Re-formation?

To write about film, or not to write about film?  That is the question.  Or the one I’m asking myself right now.  After a half-year of preoccupation with family health matters, I am deciding which writing projects to revive.  I’m going to start by writing up a few eminently recommendable recent films, which are easy to praise, and then I’ll do a lengthy but cursory round-up of what I’ve been watching lately, and see if that seems to have any point.  Feel free to weigh in with comments.

First Reformed (MC-85, NFX) represents committed work by all involved, and is intensely watchable, if dark and disturbing.  It’s somehow fitting that Paul Schrader’s career-summing mash-up of Bresson and Bergman is being marketed as a horror film, given the previews on the DVD.  This is Taxi Driver meets Last Temptation of Christ (two of the films Schrader wrote for Scorsese), plus Diary of a Country Priest meets Winter Light.  It’s bleak and beautiful, stark and thought-provoking.  Ethan Hawke’s performance truly makes the film; I’m fully ready to anoint him as the best American actor of his generation, certainly with the greatest filmography.  He’s the pastor of a small historic church in upstate New York; from a line of ministers, his faith has been shaken by the death of a son and subsequent divorce from his wife.  He’s in bad shape, physically and spiritually.  Amanda Seyfried is a young pregnant wife who comes to him for help and guidance.  (That she is named Mary is indicative of Schrader’s willingness to be obvious, as well as subtle and restrained.)  He uses the borrowed set-up to make trenchant comments on contemporary themes, from megachurches to environmental catastrophe to domestic terrorism, while mastering the interiority of a tortured soul.  Appropriate to both his models and the constriction of his Dutch Calvinist upbringing, Schrader confines his film to an old-fashioned aspect ratio, with a stationary camera except for a few bravura moves in what might be taken as fantasy sequences, which will tend to mollify or alienate various viewers.  Not to everyone’s taste, this is a film that is both derivative and very much its own thing.