# Apostle, The (1997)

### reviewed by
Eric Lurio

    Review ©1998 eric lurio

     The Apostle

     Directed by
     Robert Duvall

You can't really do one man shows in the cinema. Oh, people have tried, but on the whole it doesn't really work. so Robert Duvall doesn't bother in his latest opus. It's close, though.

Duvall is The Reverend Euliss `Sonny' Dewey, a televangelist from Texas, who spends so much time on the job that he neglects his wife Jessie(Farrah Fawcett) and children. Jessie retaliates by having an affair with another preacher named Horace(Todd Allen), for whom she grabs control of the ministry.

Upset at this turn of events, Sonny gets drunk and bashes Horace's head in with a baseball bat before fleeing.

Justly wanted for murder, Sonny goes to Louisiana, where he takes the identity of The Apostle E.F. and begins his ministry anew.

Along the way he meets a fellow who send him to Brother Blackwell(John Beasley), a retired minister who owns a derelict church which is restored by Sonny and where he starts his new ministry.

While there is a failed romance with Miranda Richardson, who plays the receptionist at a local radio station, everyone else is just a prop for Duval to spout religion at and do his Billy Sol Hargus routine for.

He's good at it, too. But the flaw(if you can call it that) here is the same as Scorcese's `Kundun,' unless you go in for that sort of thing, what's the point? It barely works as a character study.

This is great performance, but alas, not a great movie.

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews