THE APOSTLE (1997) A Film Review by Ted Prigge Copyright 1998 Ted Prigge
Writer/Director: Robert Duvall Starring: Robert Duvall, Farrah Fawcett, Miranda Richardson, Billy Bob Thornton, Rick Dial, Todd Allen, John Beasley, June Carter Cash, Walt Goggins
So...Robert Duvall's labor of love has finally come out. It's a film he's been trying to make almost all of his life, and only until the whole Indy spiel has become trendy now has he been able to get his funds together to make it. Is it a great film? Sure. It has one of the most intriguing protagonists in cinema this year, and features a toss-up for the single best performance of the year (tied with Ian Holm's brilliant acting in "The Sweet Hereafter"). It has a very good message, one that isn't pummelled into the brain but is reflected on slowly as the film opens up. Is it brilliant though? Well...close but no cigar.
"The Apostle" of the story is a Texan man named Sonny (Duvall), a man who seems to be like one of those people you see in airports or on the religious channel on cable who preach the gospel like they wrote it and swear they love God more than anything in the world, and also try to get us to follow in their "holy" footsteps. Sonny swears he talks to God every night, and has the power to heal and all that stuff. The thing is he really can. Elmer Gantry, he's not.
Unfortunately, Sonny is not perfect. After all, he's not God. He sometimes drinks too much, has rigid relations with his also religious wife (Farrah Fawcett - !!), and yeah, has a temper. After discovering that his wife has been carrying on an affair and wishes to leave him, kicking him out of the church they founded, he goes a bit crazy, and in a fit of rage, picks up a bat and beats the lover in public. Not wishing to upset his mother (June Carter Cash) and not wanting any legal interference, he drives off, buries his car in the water, tosses his wallet away, and decides to start anew.
With his past currently out of his way, he renames himself "The Apostle E.F.," blessing himself in a river one day, and heading over to a Louisiana Community. There, with the help from an old minister (John Beasley), he begins to rebuild their old church, now decrepit and dying, getting two odd jobs to support himself, and preaching wildly at church and over the radio waves of a station owned by a man played by Rick Dial, the same actor who played the auto shop in Duvall's friend Billy Bob Thornton's "Sling Blade." And his church becomes more and more populated as the film goes on, and he reaches more and more people.
Duvall's story is one about a man who's not a perfect man, but can certainly do some very good things for people, most notably bringing people together with belief in God. This is not a pro-religion film, or a satire on the way people can be brought together by faith alone, but a story that shows that the better things a man does should outweigh the worse parts. In the end, do we really think of Sonny as a rage-filled man, who violently beat a man with a baseball bat? Or do we think of him as a man who brought together a community by showing love for Christ?
But why isn't it perfect or even very brilliant? The big problem with the film seems to be that the supporting cast and anyone else other than Sonny is horribly underwritten. A romance between him and a secretary working at the radio station (Miranda Richardson, in a convincing southern accent) feels horribly edited, while a two scene ordeal between Sonny and a bigot (Billy Bob Thornton) who wants to destroy the church because he "don't want to pray with any niggas" is too short to really make any kind of emotional feel. While Sonny is fully realized, no one else is, giving it a feeling of small incompletion.
In terms of more superficial problems, the film is incredibly slow-moving, setting up everything at tortoise-like pace, but never actually registering as "boring." The film unfolds very nicely, getting to its message by the finale instead of repeating the same thing over and over again. It's not one of the year's best films, but definitely one of the year's better films.
But what makes it all worthwhile is the absolutely perfect-in-every-way performance by Duvall, who makes Sonny into a likable, three-dimensional human being, and is completely convincing the entire time. Duvall's one of the greatest actors working today, and this film is not really the culmination of over three decades in the biz, but his acting is. Of the actors nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars this year, he totally deserves it. For the entire year, though, it's a toss-up between he and Ian Holm (as I said), though I feel that Duvall would edge ahead of him just slightly. It's inspiring to see an actor like Duvall always giving great performances; this is just his best.
MY RATING (out of 4): ***1/2
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