The Apostle (1997, Robert Duvall) (Patreon)

61/100

Second viewing, last seen at the 1997 New York Film Festival. The film then ran a whopping 148 minutes; my contemporaneous review deemed it "passionate, sincere, and gratifyingly complex" but dinged it for being "just way too damn long." The philistine's complaint, I know, but my feeling then—which remains my feeling now, though Duvall subsequently trimmed about 15 minutes—is that the lead actor's hunger to embody this particular character sometimes impedes the writer-director's judgment. While my memory's much too foggy for me to have any sense of what was cut, the finale still lasts a small eternity, and still comes across to me (admittedly someone for whom a little preaching, even of this appropriated call-and-response variety, goes a long way) primarily like Duvall providing himself with a rousing glory-hallelujah showcase. He also makes some very odd decisions vis-à-vis the cause of Sonny's arrest: There's a brief cutaway to Sonny's wife hearing a faint, garbled transmission of Sonny's radio sermon (which seems implausible given the size of the station and likely range of its transmitter, but never mind), which can only be intended to suggest that she's the one who calls the cops...but then we also get a zillion significant anguished close-ups of Sam (Walton Goggins! I had no idea that I'd encountered him prior to The Shield), suggesting even more strongly that he's the guilty party (since we'd previously seen him eavesdrop on Sonny's confession to Brother Blackwell, a moment that likewise has no other possible function). Why Duvall would want to make this an unresolved mystery, I have no idea; leaving Sam's involvement implicit works fine, but tossing in that shot of Fawcett merely serves as pointless misdirection (at best), cheapening an ending that's already slightly punishing. Very strange choice.

Then again, The Apostle concerns a man who himself makes very strange choices, driven by warring sinner-saint impulses. Virtually everything that Sonny says and does in Texas seems to establish him as a violent huckster (albeit perhaps one who's snowing himself first and foremost), and it takes a good long while to realize that he has no ulterior motive for starting the church in Louisiana—that he genuinely sees it as his calling, and is unequivocally a force for good in that (largely African-American) community. While I might have preferred a few more hints that the considerably less admirable guy we initially met still lurks within this font of generosity and compassion—Sonny's kind of aggressive in courting Toosie, barely taking "No" for an answer when she declines to invite him in at the end of their first date, but that's about it—at least it's not in any way a conversion/redemption narrative. His self-baptism comes fairly late, and we never see him express any true remorse for his actions; indeed, his efforts to evade responsibility for as long as possible (even as he clearly knows he'll be caught eventually) result in his beloved mother dying alone. He does inspire a conversion, penetrating the resentful armor of Billy Bob Thornton's racist "troublemaker" (per the credits), but Duvall ultimately allows Sonny's loathsome qualities to simply co-exist with his decency, which seems theologically apropos. And, again, I'd argue that there's no need for such sustained intensity in the final reel. Duvall—who was then already well past 60—makes Sonny such a dynamo throughout, constantly breaking into a little jog out of sheer pent-up energy, that depicting his final sermon at such length feels not just superfluous but self-indulgent. Always a danger when actors direct themselves.