The Apostle, directed by Robert
Duvall. October Films, 1997.
Southern preachers have been the butt of many a Hollywood joke. From
Elmer Gantry to Marjoe Gortner to Steve Martin's flashy trickster in
Leap of Faith, revivalistic preachers have been
depicted as cynical, manipulative, and deeply corrupt: oily hucksters
out to con their way into the pocketbooks of eager worshipers and into
the underclothes of impassioned (and preferably buxom) sisters.
Whatever good comes out of their ministries occurs either through
accident or through the generosity of someone near them, usually a
woman or child who somehow saves the preacher from his own
hypocrisies.
"Though the film sometimes bypasses complex reality for simpler images, it nonetheless
represents a welcome change from negative stereotypes of Southern Christians, and especially
revivalistic preachers."
Robert Duvall's Sonny shares many outward characteristics with these
scuzzy preachers of deception: like them he has a weakness for pretty
women, a tendency to numb his guilt with alcohol, and a violent temper
that is not infrequently directed at his wife, Jessie, and their two
young children. But there the similarities mostly end, as Sonny is a
true believer, not a fraud publicly regaling the masses with a
Christian faith that he privately scorns. Despite his repeated marital
indiscretions and his murderous attack on his wife's lover, he
considers himself a dutiful servant of God, still preaching the Word as
he has since he was twelve and working continually to save sinners from
the fires of hell. The juxtaposition between Sonny's very real
iniquity and his equally genuine rectitude gives this film its
extraordinary vigor and refreshing integrity. Resonant with the harsh
and glorious world of Flannery O'Connor, The
Apostle confronts viewers with a powerful theological
vision of sin and undeserved grace.
Taken to an otherwise completely African-American church as a child,
Sonny was bred in the musical cadences of Southern Pentecostalism and
later adopts its rhythms in his own preaching. Speaking to
congregations that seem to have triumphed over racial barriers, Sonny's
sermons focus on the two personages with whom he is most relentlessly
involved: the Devil and Jesus. In Texas, Sonny manages to serve both
masters supremely well, destroying his family and successful ministry
even as he facilitates redemption to other souls; but once over the
state line into Bayou Boutt , Louisiana, and rebaptized as the Apostle
"E. F.," he focuses with renewed vigor on the Lord's work, grateful
that God has apparently allowed him to escape his crime. He starts a
new church, the One Way Road to Heaven Holiness Temple, that
revitalizes the community; he anonymously distributes boxes of food to
the hungry; he brings love and joy and salvation to men and women in
need, including a furious redneck bent on bulldozing the racially mixed
church. Ironically, it is through a radio announcement offering to
send prayer-blessed scarves to the sick and lost elsewhere that the
folks back in Texas learn of his whereabouts and send the police down
to capture him.
His final sermon in that church, preached as deputy officers guard the
door awaiting his exit, centers on the boundless love of God, which he
illustrates by means of a tiny infant whose beautiful, innocent hands
are made to recall the nail-scarred hands of Christ. After leading Sam
the mechanic, who knows about his murderous crime, to salvation, Sonny
is led away to jail; but we see him a final time, laboring in the
fields with his chain gang, preaching to his fellow prisoners and
leading them in worshipful shouts of "Jesus! Jesus!" Though helplessly
beset by diabolical passions, he is also a man of conviction and
tenderness and will presumably continue following God in his own gritty
way.
As a director, Robert Duvall has ignored or obscured certain details
of Sonny's story. He explains little about the complicated
relationship between Sonny and his wife, conceals the identity of the
woman who took him to church as a child, and leaves to the imagination
the aftermath of the film's two powerful conversions. These omissions
detract from the film's coherence, but the spareness of detail allows
us to concentrate on Sonny's inner life and the battle he wages between
good and evil. Perhaps it is not so vigorous a battle as we expect,
since Sonny shows limited outward remorse for his transgressions, but
his haunted countenance and fiery exchanges with God are richly
suggestive of the war raging within. Duvall's brilliant
characterization of this figure resonates with the confessional message
that grace is a gift for sinners, not for saints, and deftly reveals
this grace in Sonny's raw intimacy with Jesus. Yet Sonny is a man also
urgently in need of human attachment and hungry for illicit sex, and
the question of what drives his insatiable appetites is awkwardly left
unexplored.
Duvall, who now lives in rural Virginia, has received much attention
for this film, and it is well known that after trying unsuccessfully
for a decade to get Hollywood producers interested in the project, he
used nearly $5 million of his own savings to finance it. He has
described visiting Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and, while
singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," experiencing profound faith
in Jesus and deep emotional connection to the other worshipers. It is
the power of this experience that Duvall has set out to capture in his
film, yet in his eagerness to convey Southern Pentecostalism lovingly
he neglects its underside, the ugly cruelty to which rural poverty and
racial inequity give rise and in which religion is inevitably entwined.
Sonny is allowed to be an unpretentious sinner, as is the bulldozing
redneck, but nearly all others in the film are portrayed as near
saints, especially the African American characters. The latter remain
more apparitional than real, shadowy figures who seem to have no lives
outside the church walls or the fishing hole. While Duvall, who used
more "real people" than actors in the film, surely did not intend this
effect, his lack of attention to the lived experiences of the Apostle's
congregants perpetuates romanticized images of Black religion in
disturbing and all too familiar ways. The woman sitting behind me in
the theater who snickered loudly during most of the church scenes
exemplifies the scorn that this depiction risks preserving.
Though the film sometimes bypasses complex reality for simpler images,
it nonetheless represents a welcome change from negative stereotypes of
Southern Christians, and especially revivalistic preachers. Both humor
and pathos abound, but neither overwhelms the dignity of the man whose
divided inner self is glimpsed opaquely yet felt intimately. Here, at
last, is a Hollywood preacher whose portrayal we can believe.
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