When he was lonely and struggling to find his way into LA, Paul Schrader wrote “Taxi Driver.” Today, in that distinctive, gargly, next-door-to-Nick-Nolte voice of his, the filmmaker is the first to acknowledge it: Martin Scorsese’s 1976 portrait in simmering alienation will be the first credit mentioned when the time comes to write Schrader’s obituary.
Meantime there’s another “first” to tackle, and it’s a bracing return to form for this 71-year-old writer-director. “First Reformed” starring Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried opens Friday in Chicago, and already Schrader’s drama has garnered some of the strongest reviews of his career. Hawke plays Rev. Ernst Toller, the spiritual leader of a tiny church in upstate New York. Even before the events of Schrader’s narrative, Toller is a haunted man, dealing with a deceased son, a disruptive romantic past and a crisis of faith. Toller’s doubts are heightened when Mary (Seyfried), the concerned wife of an environmental activist (Philip Ettinger), comes to Toller for guidance through a dark time. From there, “First Reformed” puts Rev. Toller through the wringer.
“It took 40 years to decide to write it, and about six weeks to actually write it,” Schrader tells me over coffee. He came through Chicago recently with “First Reformed” for a Music Box Theatre screening, part of the annual Chicago Critics Film Festival.
The script, he says, emerged from two things that happened around the same time. First, Schrader was called upon to present an award to Pawel Pawlikowski, co-writer and director of the Oscar-winning drama “Ida.” “We found ourselves talking about spiritual films,” he remembers, “and the fact that budgets had gone down so much, films that would’ve been financially irresponsible to make years earlier were becoming viable again.” Schrader shot “First Reformed” in 20 days on a production budget of roughly $3.5 million.
Not long afterward, Schrader received an invitation to a Society for Cinema and Media Studies panel on “Rethinking Transcendental Style.” The presentation owed its existence to Schrader’s 1972 critical study “Transcendental Style in Film,” in which he examined the contemplative, probing works by Robert Bresson (“Pickpocket,” “Diary of a Country Priest”); Carl Theodor Dreyer (“The Passion of Joan of Arc,” “Ordet”); and Yasujiro Ozu (“Tokyo Story”).; A revised edition of Schrader’s book was recently published.
“I came to write that book,” he says, pouring sweetener in his coffee, “because I was trying to reconcile the place I came from (Grand Rapids, Mich.; strict Calvinist upbringing in the Christian Reformed Church; a tangle of repressed impulses) with the place I found myself, in the movie industry (sex, drugs, more drugs, various personal Waterloos). As a filmmaker I never really thought the transcendental style was for me. I was too intoxicated by action, and empathy, and sex and violence. These items are not in the transcendental toolkit.”
But at the academic panel two years ago, Schrader found himself “listening to the scholars giving their papers. And I sat there thinking: ‘Well. If anybody should be rethinking this, it should be me!’ So I did.” The script of “First Reformed” emerged soon afterward.
Not much changed in the revisions except for the ending. Without giving it away, Schrader’s narrative leaves Rev. Toller at a life-or-death crossroads. “I gave the script to (New York Film Festival director and former film critic) Kent Jones, a friend of mine, and asked him what he thought of it. And he said, ‘Oh, you went for the “Diary of a Country Priest” ending. I thought you were going for the “Ordet” ending.’” Bresson’s film is a dying fall; Dreyer’s reaches for a transcendent miracle. “There were only three possible endings,” according to Schrader – the third being what he calls “the Antonioni ‘Zabriskie Point’ apocalypse, things blowing up, blowing up, blowing up.” Ultimately he went with … well, you’ll see.
“First Reformed” already has provoked its share of post-screening debates regarding Schrader’s chosen resolution. It wasn’t so different 42 years ago when Travis Bickle, the character Schrader created, went down in an extraordinary blast of carnage, only to be reborn in the “Taxi Driver” coda as a vigilante hero. Half the country remains determined to read that ending as vindication of a sociopathic but sympathetic good guy with a gun. The other half, perhaps more in line with Schrader’s unsettled feelings about the character, read it as an blackly comic indictment of a city and a nation.
“There are also people who view the ‘Taxi Driver’ ending as a post-life fantasy, and I don’t have a problem with that,” Schrader says. “As Jean-Luc Godard said: No great movie is successful for the right reasons.”
Schrader says he hopes his film, admired by both Christianity Today and a full range of godless and God-fearing critics, addresses “this odd moment we live in now,” when climate change science is used by the current presidential administration as a punch line, and cynicism battles idealism at every turn.
“You have to choose hope, as we say in the film,” Schrader says. “Even if you don’t have any reason for it, you have to choose it. And you have to live, sometimes, in a suspended world where you pretend what’s happening isn’t happening.” He completed “First Reformed” thinking it’d be “a pretty good last film.” Its success has left him feeling “intimidated by the prospect of a follow-up.” But he has a couple of ideas. And in terms of the larger cultural conversation, Paul Schrader is back.
In “Transcendental Style in Film,” the critic turned filmmaker regarded the phenomenon of so-called slow cinema and its techniques. A long take, he writes, “need not be of Olympian length to serve its purpose. It just needs to be longer than expected.” Graced with an unexpected third-act triumph, Schrader’s career is the equivalent of a long take not yet completed.
“First Reformed” opens Friday.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
