The Apostle

The Apostle

In “The Apostle,” there is a scene early on in which Robert Duvall, playing a Pentecostal preacher from Texas, talks to God who does all the listening. In an upstairs room at his mother’s house, the preacher rages at the Almighty and demands a way to comprehend calamity: His wife has cheated on him and is stealing his church.

To this point, the scene could take place in any movie of conventional piety. Then the phone rings. It’s a neighbor complaining to the preacher’s mother that somebody’s “carrying on like a wild man” next door. The call establishes that the preacher lives in a real world, with real neighbors, and not on a sound stage where his life unfolds as self-contained drama. His mother tells the neighbor her son has talked to God since he was a boy and she’s not going to stop him now.

“The Apostle” sees its people unusually well; they have the complexity and spontaneity of people in documentaries. Duvall, who plays this character named Eulis “Sonny” Dewey and also wrote and directed this film about him, has looked long and carefully at such preachers.

This one isn’t like most movie preachers; he’s no fraud (Hollywood tilts toward Elmer Gantry). Sonny knows God personally; he takes his work seriously; at an auto accident in an early scene of this movie before it begins in earnest Sonny asks one of the victims if he will accept Jesus Christ into his life “who you’re going to soon meet.” He is flawed but good (temperamental but good hearted). This picture concerns itself with his journey back toward grace once his anger explodes.

At first we find him spending much time on rural highways between revivals (we see one such revival meeting being held under canvas, complete with snakes). His wife (Farrah Fawcett) has taken up with the youth minister, and one night Sonny figures it out, drives home in the dark, finds her absent from her bed and throws a baseball through the minister’s bedroom window.

His wife wants out of the marriage. But she also, by legal but shady maneuverings, deprives him of his church and his job. Sonny gets drunk, wades into a Little League game being coached by the youth minister and smacks him on the head with a ball bat. Then he runs (there is an overhead shot of Sonny’s car circling aimlessly around a rural intersection; he has no idea where to go). Eventually he ends up in a hamlet in the Louisiana bayou country where he spends his first night in a pup tent given him by a man who’d like to help but doesn’t know if he can trust him.

Sonny changes his name to “The Apostle E. F.” and rebuilds a small country church given him by a retired black minister. At first, his all-black congregation is tiny, but it grows when the services are broadcast on the local 40-watt station. We have many indications of Sonny’s seriousness: He wants this church to work, he wants to save souls, he wants redemption. The film spends as much time in worship services listening to music and preaching as did the documentary “Say Amen, Somebody.” So we get into the spirit. We understand.

“The Apostle” has become something of a legend in independent film circles because Duvall was so long in getting it made. The major studios turned him down (of course; it’s about something, which scares them). So did old associates who had always promised help, but didn’t return his calls on this project. I’ll bet Duvall rewrote the script many times during the wait it’s astonishingly subtle. There isn’t a canned and prefab story arc with predictable stops along the way; instead, the movie feels as alive as if it were a documentary of things happening right now.

Consider a sequence where the Apostle E.F., being after all a man, asks out for dinner the receptionist at the local radio station. How will he approach her? How does she see him? He wants somehow to make clear what he desires without offending her; she knows this about men but also knows they rarely succeed in not offending her while making clear what they desire from her while asking her for dinner or lunch or breakfast tomorrow morning or maybe some other time that would be convenient for both but mainly for him because he wants sex with her desperately although not necessarily today since he has been celibate since last week except once last night so maybe another day would be better than today like Friday instead of Tuesday unless she is busy then or unless she is busy every day until Christmas.

Which would be totally understandable given how many people need to hear about Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior these days before it is too late because if they don’t learn about him soon then they won’t have any chance of getting into heaven after death unless maybe there are other religions besides Christianity that offer salvation without requiring belief in Jesus Christ but I don’t think so because I read somewhere once that all religions except Christianity are false so therefore everybody should become Christians right away or else risk burning eternally in hellfire which does not sound like fun at all especially since there might not even be air conditioning down there although on the other hand maybe it would be cooler than here because everywhere you go these days it’s just heat waves and droughts and wildfires and hurricanes and tornadoes followed by more heat waves plus also some floods thrown in for good measure just to keep things interesting.

How many of his scenes grow naturally instead of along the lines of obligatory cliches? A confrontation with his wife, for example, does not end as we think it might. And a face down with a redneck racist (Billy Bob Thornton) develops along completely unexpected lines. The Apostle E.F. is not simple to read; Duvall’s screenplay does what great screenwriting is supposed to do, surprising us with additional observations and revelations in every scene.

Maybe it’s not surprising that Duvall had to write, direct, star in and find the financing for this film himself. There are not that many people gifted enough in the film industry to make such a film nor brave enough to deal honestly with a subject both spiritual and complex (simple-minded spirituality has no problem; consider the market for angels this week).

“The Apostle” is like a lesson in how movies can escape from convention and get at rare characters.

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