On May 18, 2018, Twentieth Century Fox released “Deadpool 2” and made just over $53 million dollars. That same day, A24 burst into four theaters and released “First Reformed”, which brought in 0.0006% of its companion’s premiere winnings (only $33,778 to be exact). Now, it may seem obvious that a lifelong United Methodist with a genealogy tree that could be used to build a hundred pulpits (only nine to be exact), would choose the movie about a struggling mainline Protestant pastor battling his existential dread of a failing church and climate catastrophe.

Wrong. That same May 2018 weekend, Dan Portnof and I, in a last-ditch attempt to find respite during a sweaty Boston apartment move, gifted $30 to the “Deadpool 2” slush fund via the Regal Fenway Cinema. The heatstroke I sought to escape must have affected my memory, because other than the title, I have no recollection as to the plot of “Deadpool 2”.

But that isn’t the case with “First Reformed”. Four years too late, I found a moment to sit with Paul Schrader’s thoughtful work. Set during a snowy 2017 winter in upstate New York, Schrader writes and directs the complicated character of Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke) with a supreme amount of understanding and grace. In turn, Hawke provides a performance that even the son of a pastor found believable. In fact, that’s what made the movie so personally moving. It was the first time that I found myself, and my religious doubts, so realistically conveyed onscreen.

Oftentimes, depictions of Christianity in film and TV are subject to the extremes of evangelicalism and exorcism. In fact, I find that much of my own religious thinking via film usually comes from pictures that have no visible, on-screen relationship to formal religion at all. Yet, Schrader’s writing captivated me with an intricate plot and an even more intricate exploration of Christianity in the 21st-century.

“First Reformed” best captures its own faith-based questioning in a conversation between Toller and Michael, played by Philip Ettinger. Michael, a suicidal environmental conservationist, feels ambivalent about the recent pregnancy of his partner Mary, played by Amanda Seyfried. After a beautifully choreographed debate between Toller and Michael over the morality of bringing a child into a dying world, Toller concludes their existential duel with, “A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding those ideas in your head is life. Itself.” In this scene, Toller mirrors Paul Tillich’s progressive theology of “ultimate concern” to help Michael frame his doubts of humanity as generative rather than destructive. But just a few scenes later, the horrifying sight of Michael’s suicide places their recent conversation rather hopelessly.

From this point on, Toller takes on the burden of Michael’s death and hopelessness. In between whiskey pours, a cancer diagnosis, his newfound love for Mary, and the incoming closure of his historic “gift shop” of a church, Toller intimately engages with a struggle of faith in the midst of his new knowledge around climate disaster. All this momentum builds to the movie’s apotheosis, holding despair and hope in tension for nearly ten minutes with life itself in the balance. An ambiguous ending leaves the viewer asking yet another religious question: “What happens next?”

Unlike Deadpool 2, to watch this movie is to live in the present. Regardless of one’s own beliefs, the movie forces the viewer to be open to a realistic existence of ambiguity. The process of watching the film produces a richness of theological thought that, in my opinion, much of 21st-century Protestant church life has failed to replicate. My own viewership produced enough discernment to last me nearly three months before writing this piece.

Now, to hold despair and hope together. The despair I feel for this film is that it went largely unnoticed in 2018, and that its reckoning with climate catastrophe has aged all too well. I find hope in the fact that many others, and myself as well, eventually uncovered a film that deftly takes on religious themes without falling back on sleep-paralysis demons or sophomoric humor. 

Much like faith itself, “First Reformed” provides no easy answers or resolutions. But it does provide an invitation; an invitation to hold the despair and hope of humanity.