75. COSMOPOLIS (2012)
74. FIRST REFORMED (2017)
If the planet survives the existential threat of climate change, First Reformed will be the movie that people look to if they want to capture the muted dread of some combined with the total complacency of others that defines this era.
You would think it was directed by a millennial, or someone who fears having to live with the effects of climate change for more than the last half of their life. But the director is septuagenarian Paul Schrader, who's no stranger to quiet tension. First Reformed concerns a group of people who must continue on with their daily lives, even knowing the end is coming, and what happens when one of them won't take it anymore.
Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is the pastor of a small upstate New York Protestant church that has a claim to fame as a stop on the Underground Railroad, but is mainly eclipsed by a nearby megachurch that--for the most part--pays to keep it open as a historical curio. Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant parishioner visits him, concerned about her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), who's reluctant to bring new life into a world that he believes is dying. Michael is an environmentalist who's been radicalized, and she is concerned he will do something drastic.
Toller is the complement to Michael: he is also facing his own mortality--he has symptoms of stomach cancer--but is facing his impending death quietly and passively. Confronted with a parishioner who refuses to take his mortality lying down, Toller's entire worldview is thrown into chaos. The usual answers he gives his parishioners lose their meaning. He discovers something about the megachurch, run by the slick Rev. Jeffers (Cedric Antonio Kyles, a.k.a. the Entertainer, who plays Jeffers as 20% holy man, 40% showman, and 40% hustler) that he'd rather unsee.
The ending is infuriating because there is no closure to Toller's conundrum. It ends with a scream of pain followed by a gesture of love which is insufficient to save the planet but, Schrader hints, it may be all we have in the face of apathy and destruction.
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