It is a mix of the sympathetic and the nonjudgmental, which are very different qualities. After a brief prologue showing its protagonist as a child being taken to a black church in Depression-era Texas, The Apostle opens with a brilliant, mesmerizing scene that summarizes everything to come. A country roadside accident scene, with cops investigating and waving passing cars on. He stops, gets out with his Bible and walks through a field to a smashed car the cops haven't yet found. Inside are an unconscious woman and a young man who's evidently in shock.
Sonny leans inside and begins preaching.
Sonny's absolute certainty in his faith is his most salient quality, but one that constantly poses the question of how we feel about him. In the figures of the injured man in the car and the scoffing policeman, the film gives up the polarities of our possible responses, and a diagram of its own shrewd, artful, provocative ambivalences. The movie's first 40 or so minutes are spent observing how Sonny is both a brilliant preacher and a shit of a human being. The moment painfully captures the fascist, bullying potential in religion. But Sonny is desperate.