Beyond Good and Evil
A lot of actors have plastic
features, the kind that mold and remold themselves according to their
characters' moods; others--primarily Republicans such as Clint Eastwood and
Charlton Heston--have Mount Rushmore-esque features whose lack of plasticity is
meant to betoken strength. Robert Duvall, uniquely, has a face that manages to
be both granitelike and plastic. In repose, it is a chiseled mask, with avian
eyes that give away little; then, swamped by feeling, those features wiggle and
crack and loosen from their moorings. Does Duvall have a screw loose? I
sometimes think so. His volcanic rages don't have the put-on quality of
post- Raging Bull Robert De Niro or the preening self-consciousness of Al
Pacino; nor is he a simple-minded bully boy, like Harvey Keitel. On-screen,
Duvall's madness has a divine purity. No actor has ever brought the kind of
belief to an evangelist that Duvall brings to Sonny, the tormented protagonist
of The Apostle . And no one else could have created a character who stirs
in the film audience such disparate responses: He's magnificent, he's
dangerously crazy, he's magnificent and he's dangerously crazy.
The fact
that Duvall gives such a glorious performance in The Apostle is likely
to distract people from the fact that he has also written and directed a
glorious movie--the most vivid and radiantly made of 1997. (The film opened
briefly at the end of last year to qualify for various awards; it goes into
general release next week.) The Apostle has a laid-back intimacy that
reminds me, mutatis mutandis, of Jean Renoir, and a documentarian's penchant
for letting events play out at their own sweet speed. And if, as an actor,
Duvall gets drunk on Sonny's megalomania, as a director he keeps the character
soberly in focus, so that we're simultaneously swept up in Sonny's good while
recoiling from his evil, agog at his purity while giggling at the
hamminess.
Duvall introduces Sonny as a small boy, being led by an
immense black woman through the swinging doors of a back-country Texas church,
where the restless child is mesmerized by a gospel preacher. In no time, the
grown-up Sonny is perorating before congregations black, white, and mixed.
Happening with his mama (June Carter Cash) past a multicar collision, he seizes
his Bible and marches through a field to the worst-injured drivers. Sonny leans
into the window, places his hand on the shoulder of a young man with gelid eyes
and blood trickling from one ear, and exhorts him to live , live .
He says that there are angels in the car, that the young man has nothing to
fear if he accepts Jesus Christ as his savior--and, miraculously, the young man
manages to thank him. We never learn if he or the woman in the car with him
survive (We see her stir), but we know that Sonny's prayers have got through to
them. And we believe Sonny when he says, almost laughing in amazement at his
own gifts, "Mama, we made news today in heaven."
But
frequently the news that Sonny makes is of the tabloid variety. Thanks in part
to his "wandering eye and wickie-wickie ways," he has lost his wife, Jessie
(Farrah Fawcett), and two children (he calls them his "beauties") to Horace
(Todd Allen), a gentle, callow minister who seems to be, in every way, Sonny's
opposite. Civil and friendly toward his ex-wife and her lover, Sonny can turn
suddenly, scarily needy--pounding on their door in the middle of the night and
throwing a baseball through their window. When the anxious Jessie has him voted
out of the Fort Worth church that they founded together, something ruptures:
Unable to comprehend his banishment, Sonny spends days and nights in his mama's
attic railing at Jesus. ("I've always called you 'Jesus,' you've always called
me 'Sonny.' ") Primed with liquor, he commits a shocking act of violence, then
flees Texas for a new life--sinking his car in a swamp and baptizing himself
"the Apostle E.F."
The next 90 minutes of The Apostle
recount that new life, which the Apostle E.F. builds from scratch in a
ramshackle Louisiana Gulf town. In almost no time, he has secured a position as
an auto mechanic and a room in the home of a good-hearted grease monkey (Walton
Goggins). More important, he has sought out Brother Blackwell (John Beasley), a
retired black preacher whose fervor once generated several heart attacks and
who now reposes with his wife in a house under the highway. Blackwell doesn't
know if this self-dubbed Apostle has been sent by God or Satan (nor do we), but
he trusts that the former will soon make that plain; in the meantime, he sets
about helping E.F. to establish a parish.
Surveying
a broken-down church by the side of the former interstate, Sonny murmurs,
"Resurrection time ... resurrection time. ... Yes, sir." He concludes, "I could
do some shouting in here." He checks out the space the way a jazz musician
checks out a nightclub in which he's about to perform. The Apostle's preachings
(one can hardly call them "sermons") are marvelous production numbers,
alternately plangent and syncopated; they make everyone--even those of us in
the movie audience predisposed to find a Christian evangelist threatening--feel
welcome. I'm not sure what he says in those numbers, only that I
couldn't take my eyes off him or stop myself from nodding when his congregants
said, "Amen." Duvall has an abysmal singing voice--gargling and off-key--but
his speaking voice, his presence, is insistently musical. His Apostle E.F. is
utterly certain of what he's doing; and--even knowing what we know about his
past--we can't help sharing his conviction that something momentous is taking
place in this small town.
Where other filmmakers have tried to assert that
showmanship somehow precludes belief, Duvall demonstrates how showmanship and
belief can reinforce and even galvanize each other, the former driving the
latter to transcendental heights. (The roof of E.F.'s church features a neon
arrow pointing skyward and the words "One Way Road to Heaven.") "Holy Ghost
power !!" might sound like something out of a used-car commercial--and
Duvall is as clear-eyed on the capitalism-evangelism correlation as the
Marxist-leaning Antony Thomas in his skeptical 1980s documentary Thy Kingdom
Come ...Thy Will Be Done . But Duvall also subscribes to an American
dramatic tradition (which can be discerned in works as various as The Iceman
Cometh and The Music Man ) that says that any fervent belief, even
one based on uncertain premises and fueled by an impure source, can give life,
the way a placebo can be an authentic remedy if it empowers the body to heal
itself. Who cares if the Apostle E.F. is a madman if he can make people's
spirits soar this high? And who's to say he's a villain if he doesn't violate
the trust that his parishioners have placed in him?
Sonny
doesn't seem to have nefarious political aims; he simply wants to create a warm
and nurturing community with himself at the center. He spearheads food drives,
and disarms a racist "troublemaker" (Billy Bob Thornton) with show-stopping
bravura. At the same time, Duvall doesn't go soft on his character. Sonny never
shows a hint of remorse for the crime he committed. And when he courts the
receptionist (Miranda Richardson, never so girlishly charming) at a radio
station where he preaches, Sonny gives off glints both of his "wickie-wickie
ways" and the concomitant jealousy that drove him to become a fugitive. He's
still one scary dude--jittery and, in some fundamental way, unformed.
The Apostle is not Duvall's first directorial
effort. Back in 1983, he made an oddity called Angelo My Love , a
semi-improvised account of a boy coming of age among the gypsies. Watching that
movie, I found myself simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the
characters in ways that left me confused (and also impressed). At times, Duvall
seemed to be sentimentalizing the gypsies; at others, he seemed to be rubbing
our noses in their ugliness and duplicity--or was that just my racism? It was
hard to know. The same kind of tension exists in The Apostle , but these
are Duvall's people, and here he seems fully in control of our responses. The
performances, down to the smallest congregant, could not be richer. And
Duvall's Sonny is both in our face and yet tantalizingly out of reach,
infantile and of amazing stature. We wish we could be like him, and we thank
the Lord Almighty that we're not.
