Rarely has a location married quite so effectively with a film-making style. Writer-director Paul Schrader’s study of an increasingly disenchanted man of God takes as its main backdrop a 250-year-old church. The pure, unadorned lines of the building mirror beautifully the austerity of Schrader’s pared-back vision. This is a film that wrestles with its themes through rigorously crafted dialogue; Schrader sees no benefit in underlining those words with showy camerawork or score, the film-making equivalent of going through the script with a neon highlighter pen.
With only the subtlest of sound designs and the director’s screenplay to play with, the focus falls on the performances. Ethan Hawke, whose great gift as an actor is that you can almost never see him acting, is superb as the troubled pastor who is driven towards desperate acts by his concerns about the world around him (and yes, the parallels with both Taxi Driver and Bringing Out the Dead are impossible to ignore). The moment Schrader loosens his grip on the picture is the moment that it loses focus – the final 10 minutes are bold, stylised and ambiguous. But for me, they are the least satisfying scenes in the film.
