"First Reformed" and the Decision to End Something

or not, or whatever.

I just watched Paul Schrader’s powerful and bleak 2017 film “First Reformed” and I’m going to do a little bit of a knee-jerk response about it. Maybe with time and distance my thoughts here will change, but I’m thinking it over now so I’ll loop you in on the process. I’m going to be focusing pretty specifically on the ending, so if you haven’t seen it go ahead and watch it if you’re in the headspace for a mostly grim film, a dreary meditation on the slow death of our planet told alongside the crisis of faith of an alcoholic pastor. Spoilers begin immediately.

“First Reformed” spends the majority of its narrative and thematic energy thinking about global climate change, the companies responsible for it, the individual people who run those companies and whether or not we should do anything about it. It all parallels the deteriorating body of pastor Toller, played wonderfully by Ethan Hawke, whose alcoholism is drawn as a clear comparison with environmental pollution. It all culminates in him making the decision to don the suicide bomb vest found earlier (I’m not gonna give a full synopsis, if you haven’t seen the movie just go watch it), to kill a prominent energy CEO along with a handful of government figures and, presumably, a few innocent people attending the re-consecration ceremony at his church.

We’re to understand his mind is made up, but the decision is complicated when Mary, a figure that sort of stands in for the possibility of any hope in the world and the only person with whom he has a real relationship, shows up after being told not to attend the event. Toller’s response to remove the bomb vest, wrap himself in barbed wire and pour drain cleaner in his whisky glass, is chaotic, hard to watch and appropriately theatrical. When Mary suddenly appears in his parsonage they kiss, the camera moves freely around them, the music from the church swells before we cut immediately to silent black. One of those cool, interesting ambiguous endings film guys love.

I really enjoyed this film, I was deeply impacted by the experience of it, but I find this ending to be a massive stumble and, honestly, a cowardly choice.

Obviously the details of this conclusion are deliberately left up for interpretation, which I often love in storytelling (my own book has a very abrupt and ambiguous ending, but my hope is that it aligns with the book’s core themes and also it’s my first novel, and I’m not Paul Schrader). My reading is that Toller does in fact drink the drain cleaner and has a post-death vision of a heavenly Mary appearing before him. Truly I think that conclusion has frustratingly little to actually say, and I don’t think the movie is strengthened by its being left ambiguous.

It’s easy for someone to reply to me with a simple “well you didn’t get it,” and maybe I didn’t. But to me, the last few minutes don’t resonate with the ideas the movie has spent the previous two hours grappling with and encouraging me to grapple with. The movie is about whether or not we choose to let ourselves fully understand the dire state of the planet’s health, whether or not we are willing to acknowledge that it is the fault of not just “mankind” but a few specific individual people who could be named, and of course whether or not we would choose to do something about it given the chance. Mary’s husband Michael’s suicide comes immediately after they’ve taken his bomb vest. It seems like the only thing keeping him in this world was the hope that he’d be able to do something in the war against those causing climate change. With that gone, he sees no hope and no way forward. Mary and Toller’s relationship is core to the film, and everything it’s about, but at no point is the tension of the movie about their relationship. Ending on that note seems to be a misunderstanding of the text’s own purpose. A careful line is walked through the film’s duration to keep their relationship aromantic, I think that works best for the movie, and unfortunately ending with the image of them embracing in romantic passion is a betrayal of the carefully made decisions up to that point.

There is maybe a way for this movie to end with ambiguity and still remain true to its ideas. I just really feel like there’s an abrupt derailing in those final moments that shift the central conflict of the film and its central character to something totally different and much less interesting. After spending time thinking about our responsibilities to the earth and interrogating our future as a species the movie is suddenly about something only tangentially related to that. It isn’t about the people in that church anymore. It isn’t about what Toller has learned or decided to do. It doesn’t really even seem to be about the environment or personal responsibility. It seems to just be about another guy who has given up. This is literally a movie about making the decision to do something, and in the end Schrader won’t make a decision. Maybe I’m a little simple, but for me this story demanded a conclusion the film refuses to give.