to another edition of a fistful of popcorn i'm tonight's moderator my name is janet stearns and i'm thrilled to be joined by our two regular panelists bob brown and marilyn campbell and tonight will be taking up the half hour discussing paul strangers new film first reformed it's playing at both among marie and the garden theater and it's quite a provocative film there was a full house at the garden last week when someone from the the think of taxi driver off hand as being comparable film in many ways but in this case we're looking at a priest or i guess he's a priest is a protestant minister you know former church first reformed i think that's wrong or yes which is a calvinist it's a calvinist yes and we're actually living in an area where the divide between first reformed and presbyterians is right about where i live anyway so even hawke plays this minister who's on hard times and he's sort of the caretaker priest of a very old two hundred fifty year old reform church in albany near albany new york it's in albany county i think and they it has a congregation of about six people i think i count it he says he's got health problems he's got spiritual problems he's got life problems and he's depended to a big mega church which is run by cedric the entertainer yeah who's whose credits don't say that but they give his real name so you don't you're surprised when you see him and he depends on the help from cedric and they're going to i won't call him cedric that blows it anyway he he's coming up on an anniversary for the church and meanwhile he's juggling so relationships with two different women which i think is the key to this film one of whom is has had a brief fling with him and he doesn't want to go any further and he wants her to get out of his life despite the fact that she needs to save him and the other is the wife of a troubled man who is bent on saving the world if he can but he thinks it's hopeless because everything's going to be destroyed by pollution and human intervention and mucking things up and somehow he gets and meshed in that relationship with this guy and it turns out very badly for many people on many levels and i will put it i will rest so you've touched on a lot of the elements of the film paul schrader has said this is a film about despair see at the beginning to someone who is taking some very extremist steps and did you feel that it was credible a credible transition i almost don't think it was a credible friends mission but i think that by this environmentalist's despairing accounting of how we have messed up god's creation and he he's he's trying to figure out how to  how to react to that and one of i think the key point is this what is in the film i think is probably a fantasy or some sort of vision that he has when he is with the the widow wife of this and activist and she says that she used to do this thing with her husband where they would attempt to bring it together or not it wasn't it's not sexual but it's but it's attempting to get in touch with the other person's essence and while he's doing this with her he has a vision of the earth and its beauties and then it turns into the earth the fat old and i think that is the transition point where he goes from being sympathetic to being convinced that he has to do something about the situation i think he actually said you say there's a transition it's a double edged sword because he's on a knife edge between two possible reactions and i think his the references to thomas merton whom he's been reading is key there because merton was like many religious figures somebody who came out it sideways he has a dissolute use and he struggled and he went back and forth and he became immersed at an early age in his early twenties you have people like paul who is a struggle on the road to damascus you have the buddha who also has a dissolute life you see there's something in to background that has pushed him into this thing i don't want to reveal too much but i think for him the key phrase is will god forgive us and this is something that has just really put something into his head that he can't quite get out but at the same time he's struggling with the fact that he had loved a woman been married and he was rejected that that was out of his life and he's denying unself that but he can't quite get it out of him self so there is something it happens i don't want to say and i think i think there's also this sort of calvinist doctor in the sense that of predestination that everything that happens god meant to happen and therefore in fact in one of the youth groups that he is leaving during the film one of the teenagers in the group says that my dad has been always been a very good christian he's always been a church goer and he's always believed and now he's lost his job and is that a punishment for something he did and the reverend toler tries to temporize a little bit and say well we don't know god really means of it but you know and bad things do happen to good people and so on and so on and then someone else in the youth group but yeah young man challenges him and says well of our religion says of theology says that if the world is going to pot god meant it too and in fact one of the other characters says it some point when he says to the other realistic world well yeah i was reading somewhere today where the extreme of that is yeah hill destroy everything including humankind so we'll start out with a different kind of evolution that may work out better read exactly especially was also quoted in the bible as if you know the context i was i agree with everything both of you have said and i have no religious training like you do you both have much more of a foundation and marilyn you mentioned some of the things that this seminary and much talked about when does conviction become fanaticism to sixty really relevant truly what's truth what's fantasy and biblical and i have no time for that i don't worry i'm not worried about allusions in the film to various things i mean after all paul schrader was a calvinist and as paul schrader has said you cannot escape your r i can make the point that in taxi driver there's a sort of a catharsis where the trajectory of travis bickle in a negative way is somehow changed and he does something that the society thinks of as a good thing although it's equally violent but he he doesn't do something that he does something that that other people think is he killed someone of their people  killing someone that people would not think it was a good thing to wear in is this film there's no such garces and i think that that in fact paul schrader growing up a little bit and saying i don't i don't know would be anymore i just i don't i don't know the answer although there is a death and that was a form of a catharsis because after all this man who is why i said pastoral almost to the end counseled this well he failed to change the trajectory of the person who yes is no longer yes he is no longer i guess although i don't know that i blame that on any clergy no but he can blame it on himself he does whatever itself and what makes it worse is that this technical discussion of biblical why do we why do people get into that well i think the audience for that particular showing was packed by people from the theological seminary for one thing they all appear to know each other and they all and they all get they are not i don't want to hear about the pocalypse telling of this movie in the garden it's not of interest to me because it is dead stuff but not but the idea of drawing a line between conviction and fanaticism that is fascinating to me that's just one viewer's point but what about the other theological discussion that got started which was is there a is there a message of hope in the character named mary an interesting who times and there was a woman in the audience who did bring up scott pruitt that i felt was something that schrader did put in there i think you both agree that the environmental aspect of this was key yes that was but i also think i thought there was a little bit that that story why was it a little extreme and then this week i see a story in the paper that it's a trend now in europe for people to sterilize themselves because they're  despair over oh my god the environment and so the question of whether or not you should bring a child into in this film i think is not irrelevant or dead stuff the question of what kind of a world will we leave for our children and grandchildren i think is a very very key one right because a lot of environmental decisions it seems to me are being made now by our very corrupt administration on the short term  so i thought hard to do tonight just before i left here online it's and the new yorker maybe you get this too every day i get a cartoon from new york i don't know what they know i'm sorry this was a shouts and murmurs of this week and it was  bit i want to ask you about the cinematography which i thought was just absorbing everything was so perfectly framed so precise or symmetrical do you think i think well let me hear your interpretation i thought that it was really time to sort of symbolize the restoration of order to sort of chaos so i thought it was more that th it's important that this first reformed church because this film is called first reform and is two hundred fifty years old and has a long history behind it of pastors who have served their community well and who have you know ministered to their flock et cetera et cetera and bad the building itself is a federal style building extremely symmetrical harry extremely structured and that that is now i mean that's the point of it it's very structured in its way but it's much more embracing of a crowd yeah whereas this is rigid for a congregation straight forward yeah yeah i think horizontal also but in this case i watched carefully a couple of scenes where he visits the house that the woman that her husband live in right if you notice the upper story it's three windows when he comes again and it's a much more disturbing moment the camera pans away from that and slowly hands off to the driveway back to the garage and i thought ok he's taking it out of that sort of holy space and pushing it into a much more dangerous into serving space and throws you off the center of the other place where this the pregnant woman and they do the flying on the floor you notice a scene very pointedly where her hair comes right down so you get the picture what's happening there and that went sometimes to her living room in the against very symmetrical you know here she's there the couch is here the tables here but yeah but that was yeah that's true i didn't realize that about the hair yeah yeah well what's your point though what does that mean i think that's another transition i think that's another transformative moment where he's thrown out of his the zone of his self absorbed self punishment and i don't want to give away the ending to this i don't really think it works quite but if you make it if you look at the film as being a parable of a guy who discovers love in a certain way then the point of the film is what schrader makes at the end and you can throw out all the theology if you focus on just him as a person at that point and what he's gone through personally and emotionally regardless of religion point one there i felt even though i don't know anything about churches i felt a very strong sadness about what this church used to represent for a community probably the center of a social life so much also the center of a moral life because if you learn that you have to stop on the hear what he's saying and by his voiceover and in bad diarrhea he is struggling with the idea that he can no longer pray that he no longer feels a connection to god that he struck he wants that he used to have it and he's not feeling it anymore and why does his purpose who wife if and can he counsel other people or lead a congregation if he no longer has a connection to god and that that is one of the things he's looking for in the in that and this diary is the same purpose and battery of a country priest it's a young priest who is starting out in his first parish and has a very difficult congregation is very difficult to make any connections with people and he writes in his diary saying i can't i have trouble praying i'm not feeling god i don't know how to reach people i don't know i  garden marilyn you probably know this but i heard in an interview with her on fresh air and he made the point he said that he came to film through in college when they started showing european call art films and he went to one and realize and it was through a glass darkly bergman and he realized that the just that the topics and the inference is in the allusions in these films were the same things they were you're acting don't let anybody catch you up it's it's one of his most of doing performances i think i've ever seen in terms of that emotive part but you just look at his face and you can see behind it all of the rich and the doubts the yeah there you go oh i think that's absolutely true they've had that it's it's one of those miracles of movies that just by focusing on somebody's face even if they're not doing anything or thinking anything we can read read something into a project and i think that he was purposely bang blank so that we could proceed and what we might be feeling in his situation i think shooter also said to him any time you feel the urge to go out take indian point it inward and let the audience come to you right there and i think that that he definitely did that i was i always thought  come to that theater as a kid and throw candy at people's heads and now it's so friends don't have them on fresh air he said that he was baptized at trinity church in princeton new jersey and he was very very fond of gene smith who i guess was the reverend f yeah well quickly to sum up their own what did you think i was very disturbed by this film and and we didn't allude to how it ends but it ends very abruptly and with this feeling of nothing has been resolved exactly that that we are left to figure out what should happen what could happen what did happen and there's an element of fantasy in the last scene as well  and and certainly the issue of what to do about the world family itself and despair at what you can do now because you know climate change may have it has to the point of could do a whole show on the last five minutes of the film and you would either accept it and embrace it or hate it and i have very mixed feelings about how this this and  gorgeous photography and acting lot of silence is very pregnant pauses all of that especially like yeah yeah very much so and you're hanging it's a kind of thing where you could think i'm going to be bored there's just too too little action going on but that's the whole point of the thing it's very much interior very i won't say what i thought because we have twenty four second ok so i wanted to announce twenty seconds for you out there that the princeton student film festival it will be happening july seventeenth eighteenth and nineteenth the seventeenth is at the garden theatre at seven pm and the other two nights are at the princeton public library will be twenty six films being shown documentaries i've actually and animation they're all wonderful it's free so come out into i and many of the filmmakers will be there to talk about the hymns there thank you very much and thank you for joining us go see the film