The best film ever made about climate change is First Reformed. It\u2019s far removed from the dry data, information, and news we\u2019re constantly exposed to about global warming. This film is mind-opening, questioning the connection between the earth\u2019s decline and our values, the meaning we place on life, our faith, and our relationships with people and loved ones.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s philosophical without being suffocating. Calm, yet far from peaceful. First Reformed is a wholly unique film, showing the fine line that can exist between a vow to protect life and the temptation toward violence.<\/p>\n
At its core is religion and faith, as the title is derived from a church in the U.S. Ethan Hawke plays the film’s main character, a pastor at this church. But unlike the familiar archetypes, he\u2019s an intellectual, deep, and lost religious figure. Ordinarily, religious figures aren\u2019t the type of character I\u2019m drawn to. Yet in today\u2019s world, where spirituality has been reduced to Instagram posts and quasi-spiritual, yoga-centered groups that blur the lines between concepts, characters like Ernst Toller, played by Hawke, emerge like a lifeline.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been reading Dostoevsky\u2019s The Brothers Karamazov recently, and a character in that book evoked a similar feeling. Today\u2019s world could use intelligent, grounded thinkers who have lived through life\u2019s complexities, who center their beliefs in love without sacrificing reasoning and inquiry, and who have spent their lives seeking rather than giving absolute answers.<\/p>\n
In the film, Pastor Ernst Toller is a man with a history of deep pain and loss, and this past, coupled with his struggles over how faith and religion can respond to today\u2019s crises, transforms him into a lost soul. Ethan Hawke brilliantly portrays Toller\u2019s character as he speaks quietly, face lit with calm insight about faith and life, and in the next moment, his face darkens with rage, his patience snapping with those who frustrate him. His performance is poetic from start to finish.<\/p>\n
By the way, this movie features the most non-erotic erotic<\/em> scene I\u2019ve ever seen.<\/p>\n The screenwriter and director is Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver. Undoubtedly, he has poured everything he has into what may be his best work, infusing it with his own questions about faith and belief.<\/p>\n First Reformed is a deeply stirring film, one that invites analysis, reflection on its symbolic language, and self-questioning throughout. It\u2019s harsh, painful, but a kind that heals as it burns.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll end with one of my favorite quotes from the film:<\/p>\n \u201cCourage is the solution to despair. Reason provides no answers. I can’t know what the future will bring; we have to choose despite uncertainty. Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously: Hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Keeping both alive in our mind is what life itself is.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The best film ever made about climate change is First Reformed. It\u2019s far removed from the dry data, information, and news we\u2019re constantly exposed to about global warming. This film is mind-opening, questioning the connection between the earth\u2019s decline and our values, the meaning we place on life, our faith, and our relationships with people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n