Into the Night RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE IN FIRST REFORMED
‘Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?’
So asks Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist battling debilitating depression, in the opening act of First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017). He’s putting the question to a local pastor, Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), who’s there at the behest of Michael’s wife, Mary (Amanda Seyfried). She’s pregnant, and the thought of bringing life into a dying world, in full knowledge of the imminent climate cataclysm, has filled Michael with guilt.
His question about God’s forgiveness is a provocation: issued to the film’s protagonist, but also by Schrader to its audience. Schrader has long been a provocateur, having penned the screenplay to Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), that antisocial classic steeped in the urban decay and post-Vietnam loathing of 1970s America. First Reformed shows Schrader, now in his seventies, delivering a movie with similar spirit, social angst and anger. ‘Taxi Driver is full of young man’s rage,’ Schrader says, ‘and this new one is full of despair.’1
Despair comes up as the two men talk, in a face-to-face sit-down that echoes another on-screen conversation between protester and priest in Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008). ‘Wisdom,’ counsels Toller, ‘is holding two contradictory truths in our mind simultaneously: hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself.’ And yet, as Michael presents him with the grim facts about climate change, Toller’s equanimity starts to erode, as if despair is being passed from one man to another, like germs in a pandemic. When Michael dies by his own hand, the reverend is essentially bequeathed his burden, as Toller starts contemplating his own acts of environmental activism and eco-terrorism.
, as such, is about mid-life crisis as crisis of faith. Undergoing his ecological awakening, Toller is forced to wrestle with his beliefs, to confront an apocalypse that’s human-made, not God-ordained,
