First Reformed is a slow-paced movie that builds to an expected climatic ending that doesn’t squarely deliver it’s punch. Ethan Hawk plays a depressed minister in an historic upstate New York tiny church with a string of unresolved issues haunting him. This church is overshadowed by its contemporary, which handles the business side of this historic little chapel. The story of this minister is a good story. Layers build and are dug into. But I wasn’t moved. It all fell flat.
The film moves slowly as it works to build the characters; that build felt choppy. The relationships that develop in the film felt rushed, hurried, and shallow. Although a lot of meat exists in the narrative, the structure fails it. It’s like the background story that ties things together: a friend asked me if this was the film about environmental activism/terrorism (based on her reading about the movie). Well, not really. But one could say that the environmental aspect of First Reformed has its own part in the development of the key characters. But even that part never fully gels for me.
What actually struck me most about this film was the racial integration of the services, parishioners, and ministers. Okay, so maybe things are that different in upstate New York. I’m not sure the roots of the southern black American churches and gospel worship style are planted as deeply there. Not knowing that, I’m not sure how I feel. I mean, I’m all for a society where integration is the norm. But I don’t want that at the cost of culture and history. For example, there were a lot of black people in these church scenes and not a drop of gospel music. That just didn’t ring anywhere near true for this southerner. Instead, it felt forced — almost token. And that soured me.
The film has been nominated for an Oscar: Best Original Screenplay. I’ve so far seen only three of those five movies, and I liked the other two more than this one. Maybe I’m not being fair enough to the film; I’m not sure. But it just didn’t grab me the way I expect an Oscar-worthy film to. Or maybe that’s it: the story has great potential (and it does), but it did not deliver it’s potential to this viewer.