The Apostle

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

How appropriate to be writing a review of a film like "The Apostle" on the
birthday of the god his followers celebrate. Although Mel Gibson's
"Passion" comes to mind immediately when you think of Hollywood stars
bankrolling movies about Christ or Christianity, Robert Duvall took a
similar risk in 1997. Unlike Gibson, Duvall is far less interested in
proselytizing for a particular religious point of view than in
understanding the religious mindset. Written and directed by Duvall and
featuring him in the role of the Pentecostal preacher Euliss "Sonny" Dewey,
"The Apostle" defies easy interpretations--including from the left.

Sonny Dewey's Forth Worth church has lots of black parishioners who respond
enthusiastically to the ecstatic sermons he belts out while strutting
around the tabernacle like James Brown. In the opening scenes we learn that
Dewey developed an affinity for the passionate and extroverted style of
black preachers while in the company of his black nanny as a young boy.

It should come as no surprise that Sonny has trouble warding off Satan, no
matter how many times he has ordered him to get behind. When his wife
(Farah Fawcett) tires of his philandering and boozing, he seems incapable
of change. Instead of admitting his guilt, he implores her to get down on
her knees with him and pray to Jesus in order to rekindle their marriage.
She will have none of this, since she has obviously been through this with
him too many times in the past.

It turns out that she has already developed a relationship with the youth
minister in Sonny's church and has also convinced the executive committee
of the church to fire him. Driven to a blind rage, Sonny crowns the man
with a baseball bat at his son's little league game to the horror of
congregation members in the bleachers and his son and daughter whom he
calls his "beauties."

Sonny takes on the lam from Fort Worth. The only people he trusts at this
point are his best friend Joe, whom he saved from a life of booze and
promiscuity, and his pious mother. The two are played respectively and more
than capably by country singing star Billy Joe Shavers and June Carter
Cash, the renowned country singer and late mother of the late, great Johnny
Cash.

One of the more captivating moments of this odd but captivating film is
June Carter Nash singing a hymn along with Sonny as they drive along a
Texas road moments after stopping by the wreckage of a huge, multiple car
collision. Sonny takes his bible under his arm and goes to a crumpled car
off the side of the road, where he discovers the injured occupants just
moments away from death--a teenage boy and girl. Sonny implores them to
accept Jesus as their savior so that they can live in bliss for all
eternity in heaven with the angels. A highway patrolman shooing Sonny away
asks him if preaching does any good. Duvall answers that he would prefer to
die that day in god's good graces than to live for a hundred years in sin.

Sonny leaves everything behind him in Fort Worth and resurfaces as "The
Apostle E. F." in a tiny, impoverished Louisiana town where he attempts
with some success to launch a Pentecostal church that attracts poor and
African-American worshippers (played mostly to great effect by
non-professionals.) Without giving away too much, we can say that he finds
redemption here. When a local racist played by Billy Bob Thornton stages an
assault on the church, Sonny fends him off at first with his fists and then
with prayers. It is a credit to Duvall's acting and writing skills that we
begin to regard Sonny as a kind of hero, especially in light of our
wariness about Bible Belt values raised to higher levels after the 2004
elections no doubt.

"The Apostle" generated some expected responses from the left when it came
out. The World Socialist Website wrote:

"A film with evangelism as its subject, one would think, ought to attempt
to tell its audience something about the source of the attraction of this
sort of religious activity for a section of the American population. Is it
not the case that poor and oppressed people often turn to this brand of
religion--with all its musical and theatrical trappings--in a desperate
search for answers to life's problems, both material and spiritual? The
Apostle tells us next to nothing about the basis of fundamentalism's
appeal, nor does it even pose the question."

Full: http://wsws.org/arts/1998/mar1998/apos-m24.shtml

On the other hand, Jonathan Rosenbaum, a highly respected left-leaning film
reviewer from Alabama originally, wrote:

"By refusing to buy into the Elmer Gantry stereotype, which suggests that
every fundamentalist preacher who shows signs of being a scoundrel is also
a hypocrite, Duvall's movie throws us into a subculture of devout belief
without the sort of moral signposts that many of us city slickers have
grown to depend on defensively and as a matter of automatic reflex. Sonny,
Duvall's troubled and troubling preacher, may be a warped creature who lies
to himself, but on the basis of everything we see and hear, he believes
deeply in saving souls. And by making all the church services interracial,
Duvall complicates our responses still further, especially if we stereotype
most white fundamentalists as racists. (Or indulge in statistical
guesswork, as Amy Taubin did in the Village Voice when she tried to prove
that the film is racist. I would claim on the basis of my experience as an
Alabama native with some background in the civil rights movement that these
integrated services are believable; whether they're typical is, of course,
another matter.)"

I agree completely with Rosenbaum. The film forces us to engage with the
main character and the world he inhabits without the usual signposts. The
fact that Duvall can make the case for Sonny at all shows that he is a
skilled artist and writer. Long ago when I took a writing class at NYU, the
instructor made a point that has stuck with me over the years. He said that
the greatest characters in world literature are villains, but it takes the
talents of a great writer to make such characters interesting or even
appealing. That is what Robert Duvall has done.

Although I could find no reference to this in reviews of "The Apostle," it
seems that the film it has the greatest affinity for is Billy Bob
Thornton's "Slingblade." Both films rely heavily on local color and on a
grotesque major character capable of acting for good and evil simultaneously.

Furthermore, both films incorporate a kind of bleak humor that I find
irresistible. For example, shortly after Sonny takes it on the lam, he
persuades an elderly black man to let him stay the night. After setting
Sonny up in his daughter's pup tent on the back lawn (which he calls a
mansion on the hill), he goes to bed with a shotgun in his hands. It is
Duvall's way of indicating that ultra-religious people might strike normal
people as dangerous.

If nothing else, "The Apostle" is a virtual actor's workshop. Duvall
becomes the character in a way that I have not seen outside of the best
performances of Robert DeNiro or Marlon Brando. Duvall spent time in Texas
researching his character and steeping himself in the religious community
the film depicts.

Duvall got the idea for the film while working in his first film, the 1962
"To Kill a Mockingbird." (He plays a reclusive neighbor who protects
Gregory Peck's children from a homicidal racist, despite his reputation as
a kind of bogeyman himself). Researching his role, Duvall visited a small
town in Arkansas where his character was supposed to live and where there
was a small Pentecostal church. In a January 25, 1998 interview with the
San Francisco Chronicle, Duvall recalled, ''So I went there one night and
watched this service. I'd never seen anything like it. ''It had a lady
preacher and then a guy got up with a guitar and preached and sang. And I
said, 'Boy, I want to do something with this someday.'''


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org