The Apostle

...But this isn't the way of Sonny Dewey...

...Most Americans with religious convictions feel there is nothing incompatible between their beliefs and their civic existences...

...In such reading above all, the community as well as individual readers can enter into the imaginative world constructed not by this composition alone or that one, but by all the voices in the Bible and all the voices of faith that have also lived within the world imagined by the Bible...

...Is Sonny being absolutely sincere, or is there an element of self-deceit and willfulness in his nature...

...Sequence after sequence literally and figuratively sings: children chanting the names of the Old Testament books as they help to refurbish a church...

...For Sonny Dewey, being law-abiding has little to do with working the will of the Lord...

...So a Catholic scholar might resist the choice between either the literal meaning or the allegorical, for the Catholic scholar likewise would recognize that these modes of interpretation are mutually dependent and serve distinct functions...

...There is a stylistic fissure in this movie and that is what makes it so maddening...

...Billy Bob Thornton, as the troublemaker, turns a too-schematic role into a believably disturbed young man...

...ost of the noble monstrosities of moviemaking----Griffith's Intolerance, Gance's Napoleon, yon Stroheim's Greed, Branagh's HamletIhave been the work of actors or ex-actors...

...enters the new church and makes racial slurs about the integrated assembly, Sonny faces the intruder calmly...

...And all these spirits must dwell together forever...

...Sonny's hand, so powerfully holding the back of the intruder's neck to keep him kneeling, could just as easily snap that neck...

...But, sick of his infidelities, Sonny's wife takes a younger preacher to her bed and worse---much worse from Sonny's point of view--she conspires to get her husband evicted from his own congregation...

...Like Michael Caine, Duvall knows how to recombine his tics and flourishes so as to create a man we've never seen before...

...Let nothing I've written keep you from seeing this movie...

...But if I am not being merely nostalgic, while not wanting to go back we need to find some new ways forward, ways into a new millennium that have deep roots within the past twenty centuries of the Catholic tradition...

...Allegory may no longer be to our taste, although we would be foolish (even as scholars) to declare we have nothing to learn from such brilliant readers as Origen and Augustine...

...He plays "Sonny" Dewey, a Pentecostal preacher in Texas, a man as unshaken in his faith as he is unstable in his moods...

...So it comes as no surprise that a film as amazing and as frustrating as The Apostle is the work of Robert Duvall, who wrote, directed, and financed it, and in the title role gives the greatest performance of his career...

...But make no mistake about which performance will rule your memory once you leave the theater...

...But it isn't just the content of The Apostle that disturbs but also its execution...

...But Duvall the director is having fun, too: featuring a local disc jockey giving a blow-by-blow description of how Sonny is working on the sinner, this may be the funniest conversion since Bill Walker was wrestled to salvation by the Salvation Army in Major Barbara...

...The rest of the movie recounts the fugitive's effort to create a new congregation in Louisiana, an undertaking that meets with success just before the law doses in...

...And Duvall is a formidable director of actors...

...In a second confrontation, Dewey wins the youth over with prayer in a scene surely meant to show the climactic triumph of Sonny over the darkness in his nature...

...Understood this way, the literal sense of the text is the indispensable instrument of discernment and decision making in the community of faith, and historical criticism continues to play an indispensable role in maintaining the "otherness" of the text that protects it from manipulation...

...They pound into us more thrillingly than any rock concert could...

...The man is daemonic (which,of Commonweal I 6 January 16,1998 course, is much different from demonic...

...Rick Dial, a nonprofessional playing practically the same guy he did in Sling Blade, is again instantly and tenaciously likable...

...Jewish scholars would not, I think, admit the legitimacy of a choice between halakah and haggadah, for these modes of interpretation are mutually dependent yet serve distinct functions...

...Does he surrender to the police after assaulting his wife's lover or even after learning that his victim has died...

...the ecstasy on a black child's face when a rusty trumpet is blown during a service...

...More disturbing still is the way Sonny works out his own salvation...

...That said, I must also admit that the Pentecostal scenes are gripping, exhilarating, bacchic...

...As the wife, Farrah Fawcett, who has grown ever more real as the years have aged her away from Angelhood, makes Sonny's betrayals of her visible in her face...

...Yet he's no fraud...

...Can our minds and hearts not still profit from the delicate interplay of literal, moral, spiritual, and ecclesial dimensions of the "Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard" (Matt 20:1-16) found in Origen's Commentary on Matthew...

...I don't know who's been fooling me--you or the devil...

...So he becomes a fugitive of God, not a fugitive from God...

...The surges of sensuality that drive him to adultery also drive him to the lusty worship of God...

...When he keeps vigil outside the house where his wife is sleeping with her lover and toys with a loaded revolver, this minister hasn't forgotten God: he is talking to God, grumbling against God, egging God on to do something about his misery...

...I was grateful for being taken into a world so foreign to everything I've known, but I also felt frustrated that Duvall, having established a character worthy of Flannery O'Connor, allowed the portrayal to be overwhelmed by documentarian verisimilitude...

...We all know that Caesar and God are often opposed, as witness the civil disobedience of Christians during the Vietnam War...

...Yet, as staged, there's a very fine line in this preacher between evangelical strength and gross, muscular force...

...When a young troublemaker, for no apparent reason (a redneck angel sent to wrestle with a latterday Jacob...

...he really believes he is literally opening the gates of heaven to those who hear him...

...But when the tough threatens to shatter the preacher's organization, he is doing the same thing physically as Sonny's wife did organizationally, and Sonny's response becomes, once again, violent...

...If Director Duvall's devotion to naturalism rather undermines the dramatic articulation of his story, Actor Duvall's mastery of naturalism keeps Sonny Dewey's fate a living issue in our minds, no matter how thickly the documentary details crowd...

...Indeed, I wonder whether the purposeful playfulness found in some postmodernist readings of the Bible might not rightly claim a share in the noble heritage of allegory...

...Some of the mannerisms we've seen before: the cockily waggling head from Lonesome Dove, the bowlegged strut from Apocalypse Now, the shy suitor's gaze masking inner fire from Tender Mercies...

...Even after he builds a new life and congregation for himself, there remains something turbid and maniacal in Sonny's conduct...

...Much reading is for wisdom and delight...

...Most startling is the way the flamboyant British actress Miranda Richardson subdues herself to the role of Toosie, Sonny's second love, creating a woman both fluttery and firm, nonplussed and flattered by her suitor's ardor but strong enough to take a clear look at the turbulence beneath that ardor...

...His rage for salvation isn't plainly distinct from the rage that prompts him to crack a man's head open...

...And when that bland face is shadowed by jealousy or glows with faith, we know that the actor has conceived of Sonny Dewey as a temple where spirits assemble: furious spirits who urge murder and beneficient spirits who forgive and embrace...

...I'm mad at you, Lord...

...The Apostle has a genial, open-air look and a v i b r a n t , f o r w a r d - t h r u s t i n g rhythm, yet possesses dark undertones...

...It's as if Wise Blood suddenly turned, midnarrative, into a PBS "Frontline" report on fundamentalism...

...The early sequences are powerful psychological drama, but most of the second half veers into documentary with its extraordinary recreation of Pentecostal worship...

...On stage, leading white, black, and Hispanic congregations in prayer, Dewey bellows, sings, stomps, dances, claps, whirls, performs...

...But not every reading of the text within the church is for deciding halakah...

...another child windmilling his arms in joy as he hears the grown-ups testify...

...There is nothing quite like The Apostle in the history of American film...

...Rather than a "right" reading of the text, therefore, we properly look for "responsible" readings, by which we mean interpretations that are both responsible to the text and responsible to the community of readers that is the church...

...On this question, the film is fascinatingly ambiguous...

...In a fit of rage, Sonny slams his son's baseball bat against his rival's skull, then flees under an assumed name, "Apostle...

...I am not certain how much of what I called at the start a midlife reflection is really only my personal midlife reflection, or how much I alone am the third-generation immigrant who senses as much loss as gain in the new world so recently won...

...But there are a bunch of unprofessionals in this movie, and Duvall coaxes all into an utterly convincing group portrait...

...But it's one thing to acknowledge this and quite another to countenance a hero who walks away from his crime and its lawful punishment so as to continue preaching...

...He has the charisma of Mick Jagger and the rawthroat power of Joe Cocker, and about as much sexual restraint as your average rock star on the road...

...Commonweal | 7 January 16, 1998...

...But it doesn't matter...

...He realizes that he has sinned, but how can he let himself be jailed when God is not through with him as a free-ranging minister...

...His sixty-six-year-old body may have thickened with age, but Duvall has kept it supple enough to make Sonny a dervish on the religious platform, while his voice is an instrument that can harangue, caress, bark, wail, or simply bang...

...At a preview screening, Texasborn Horton Foote (who wrote Duvall's Tender Mercies) mistook Richardson for a nonprofessional from Texas, so precise yet unfussy is her performance...