# Apostle, The (1997)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    The Apostle (1997)
    * * * *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp

"The Apostle" is one of the very few American movies I know of that is not only about religion but seems to be informed by the very spirit of what it studies. It doesn't make its subjects into easy, hypocritical targets or strawmen. Many people do believe in God without being the kind of Bible-clutching psychotic characters that Hollywood loves to indulge in. The movie, which was written and directed by Robert Duvall as a labor of love, does not indulge in such easy cliches.

Duvall's Euliss Dewey, or "Sonny" as he's known -- the apostle of the title -- isn't just a man who talks to God. He has out-and-out shouting matchines with Him. One of the early scenes of "The Apostle" has him pacing in his room like a prisoner in solitary, bellowing at God, begging Him to let him have his wife and children and ministry back. His wife, you see, has been cheating on him with another man, a youth minister, and she's now using underhanded tactics to get Sonny voted out of the church. Then the phone rings and Sonny's mother answers, telling the angry neighbor on the other end of the line that Sonny's been talking to God ever since he was a boy, and she sees no reason to tell him to stop now. And she hangs up with a gentle smile on her face and goes back to sleep.

There's some symmetry here with an earlier scene, where Sonny and his mother stop at the scene of a roadside accident. Sonny pokes his head in the driver's- side window of a car where a young man lies bleeding, and gently asks him if he's ready to accept Jesus as his savior. The man agrees. In any other movie this would be farce, caricature, borderline bad taste. But the way it's seen and played and directed here tells us, gently, that everyone involved, from the victim to the cop who comes to shoo Sonny away, takes this seriously.

Sonny is a charismatic Pentecostal preacher who tours and shouts and whips up his congregations into jubilation. He's fond of wild metaphors: "Tonight we're going to short-circuit the Devil! We're going to plug into a power line that's wired straight into the Pearly Gates!" But his marriage is troubled, and his wife (a neurasthenic Farrah Fawcett) fears something in him. We get a hint of what that might be one day when Sonny confronts the youth minister one day during a softball game and smashes him over the head with a bat.

Sonny flees, heads to another state down South, and changes his name to "the Apostle E.F.". In one of the best scenes in the movie, he ingratiates himself with a black man who lets him sleep in a pup tent on his property. One of that man's friends is a retired preacher, and E.F. hooks up with him to start a small congregation of his own.

The congregation is tiny, but E.F. gets it going with sheer sweat -- working odd jobs at the local garage (one of the mechanics dotes on him), getting promoted on the local FM station ("We have a pay-before-you-preach policy here," the program director informs him, having been stiffed too many times before), and putting together Thanksgiving baskets for the poorer families. He's redeeming himself -- not just in the eyes of the characters, but in OUR eyes as well, because at first we're not really sure if he's just putting on a good front of change, or is really changing.

Then other things start to happen, so casually we barely notice them creeping up on us. E.F. has a showdown with an almost compulsively angry bully (Billy Bob Thornton) that does not end in the way we would anticipate. E.F.'s family back at home starts to ask about him. And then there is the matter of the youth preacher, for which E.F. will eventually have to answer.

The film is shot in a quasidocumentary style that feels almost like eavesdropping. No one reaches for affect or "acts". The actors are all unknowns, aside from Duvall himself, playing the preacher as though born to the role, Fawcett, and Miranda Richardson as the radio station secretary. Because of this, we don't see a bunch of "Jesus freaks"; we just see people with a deep and abiding faith that gives them a genuine community and togetherness. The whole film feels alive and spontaneous; it isn't just another plot out of the Hollywood shrink-wrap factory.

Duvall's movie works on almost too many levels to list. It's spiritual without being smarmy or cloying; it's an affecting character study (E.F. is far from being one-sided); it's great fun. It only seems appropriate, in today's climate, that he would have had no choice but to make the movie himself.

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own

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