"Eighth Grade" and "First Reformed"

And now, a couple of quick thoughts on films in the awards race.

"Eighth Grade" is a smart, touching film that I found far too painful a watch to really enjoy.  We meet Kayla (Elsie Fisher), just a few days before the end of her eighth grade year, and looking ahead to high school.  She's an avid vlogger, but is shy and quiet offline. Her single father Mark (Josh Hamilton) tries to be encouraging, but she resists his efforts to connect.  Attempts to be more social and attract boys tend to only lead to anxiety and embarrassment. Skirmishes with sexual activity are terrifying. Kayla finds herself frequently miserable, and increasingly uncertain about her future.

What's so fascinating about the movie isn't only that it's such a warts-and-all picture of an average American teenager, but that it's deliberately about a girl growing up in 2018, with a real teenager's relationships to social media and other modern technology.  Kayla's woes are familiar, but amplified by alternately too much or too little information about sex and relationships. Director Bo Burnham also uses the lack of privacy inherent in social media to get us uncomfortably close to the heroine. Kayla's vlogs are used as a framing device, filling the movie screen with her pretty, but blemished face, and her voice desperately trying to sound more mature and confident than she clearly feels.  We're forced to look at her directly, to acknowledge her as important unlike most of the other people in her life.

Elsie Fisher is quite a talent, able to convey Kayla's underlying discomfort and loneliness in scenes where she's pretending that she's okay.  She's relatable and raw, and completely appropriate for the low-budget indie aesthetic Burnham embraces. I look forward to seeing her in other projects, and hope that she doesn't become too much of a polished ingenue too quickly.  There have been a few complaints that the film is very roughly hewn, but I think that makes it feel all the more genuine. Due to the specificity of the references, "Eighth Grade" is going to age very quickly, but it has managed to capture a moment in time in a way that few films of this kind do.           

And now for something completely different.  I've been putting off writing about "First Reformed," because I didn't like it much, even though it does some very impressive things.  Paul Schrader's profile of a priest who becomes consumed by his crisis of faith is angry, intelligent, and moving. Ethan Hawke delivers a very good performance as Reverend Toller, who looks after a historic Roman Catholic church and its dwindling congregation.  The film's messages are refreshingly topical and direct, and I like the concept of a priest confronting what he doesn't like about modern Christianity in America. I'm just not sold on what Schrader does with the idea.

I suppose the biggest issue I have with "First Reformed" is that it comes off as more of a polemic than a character piece.  We watch as Father Toller struggles to counsel a radical environmental activist, Michael Mansana (Philip Ettinger), who has become distraught at the idea of bringing a child into a world on the brink of climate change catastrophe.  We watch Father Toller grow dissatisfied with the Church leadership, and the spiritual failings of a more prosperous local megachurch, run by Reverend Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer). We watch as Father Toller resists the charms of Michael's pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried), who is obviously symbolic of salvation.

And all this is very well and good, but I didn't buy where Father Toller's spiritual journey took him.  I found the film's ending to be fundamentally misguided, and deployed in such a way that didn't remotely ring true to life.  We've seen priests undergoing crises of faith before - John Michael McDonagh's "Calvary" with Brendan Gleeson is a good recent example.  Schrader, however, is focused on earthly matters more than spiritual ones, and even with Father Toller helpfully providing narration of his inner thoughts via diary entries, I couldn't follow how his disillusionment and depression caused him to go full Travis Bickle.  Ethan Hawke does what he can, but Father Toller never stopped feeling like a convenient construct rather than a red-blooded human being. So as much as I admire the various parts and pieces, the film never worked for me.

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