Robert Duvall's "The Apostle": A Review

 

When Robert Duvall tried to get financial backing to make his film The Apostle, he was turned down. Executives told him that there was too much dialogue. Duvall’s reply was that if there was one thing that characterized all preachers, it was their ability and propensity to talk, from morning till night; Jesus talk was a preacher’s stock in trade.

The idea of playing a “holiness”—or Pentecostal—preacher came to Duvall some twenty-five years before he actually made the film; he wrote the screenplay fifteen years before The Apostle became a big-screen reality. The project had become such a large part of his soul that he ended up putting up five million dollars of his own money just so that he could get it done. Praise the Lord and thank him for inspiring Robert Duvall to make this movie. From those who have seen it, let me hear an “Amen.”

I love Robert Duvall. One of my favorite movies is Tender Mercies, for which he won the Oscar for best actor. The subtle evolution and partial redemption of the country singer/composer Mac Sledge was masterfully portrayed by Mr. Duvall and the award was richly deserved. I recently watched The Great Santini, in which Duvall plays the role of Lt. Col. Bull Meechum, the tough, deeply troubled commander of Marine unit and family unit. Duvall was brilliant. Of course, his performance as the subtly humiliated consigliore to the Corleone family in The Godfather was remarkable for its understatement. I have already talked about his role in the remarkable True Confessions (here).

The first time I saw The Apostle I would have agreed with those movie executives: too much preaching—so much Jesus talk from Duvall’s character that it simply overwhelmed the story. I thought that Duvall, who appears in nearly every scene (quite a feat, actually, given that he also directed the film), was being somewhat self-indulgent. Duvall’s 1998 interview with Charlie Rose and a second viewing of the film caused me to change my mind.

Once Duvall had secured the funding to make The Apostle, he visited large numbers of holiness churches, white, black, and integrated, in the southern United States. He met preachers famous and unknown. In nearly every case he was impressed with both the sincerity and the preaching skill of these men of God (I don’t think he mentioned any women) and imbued the character of Sonny Dewey, also known as the Apostle E.F. in the movie with these characteristics, which come out not only in Sonny’s preaching—and yes, there is indeed a great deal of it—but also in his love for the little church he establishes and for the community that grows within and without its walls.

Euliss “Sonny” Dewey’s roots are deep in southern evangelism. In the opening scenes of the film we see him as a four-year-old sitting in a black church with his nanny listening to an old blind preacher, who is shouting, stomping, prancing around the pulpit at the front of the church: “Can you say ‘Yeah, Lord’? Yeah, Lord! Yeah Lord! Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Jesus!” Later we see him as a twelve-or thirteen-year-old prodigy preacher, delivering the fiery message himself in another black church.

Sonny Dewey is a good man, a man of God. But he is not without flaws, some of which are serious. After he discovers his wife having an affair and after he is voted out of a church he created, he commits a terrible act and is forced to flee and to live life in a far-off town not as Sonny Dewey but as “the Apostle E.F.”

It is impossible for the Apostle to remain hidden, however. He needs to preach, he needs to praise the Lord in a loud voice, and he needs to create and lead a faith community. With the help of a retired local pastor, he renovates an old church and through radio sermons, charity work, and the sheer power of his belief and his charisma, quickly builds a devoted congregation.

Even after he is found and goes to prison, he continues to preach. In the final scene of the film he is leading a road gang of convicted criminals in a litany of praise to Jesus.

The Apostle/Sonny Dewey is a complex man—a man with a big heart, a big ego, big desires and appetites. He can beat the daylights out of a cracker who acts disrespectfully in his church and be as tender and as forgiving as an angel when that same man comes back with a bulldozer to knock the church down. He is clever and resourceful, impish and cute, passionate and explosively violent. He knows who he is and never pretends to anyone that he is a saint.

Robert Duvall lived with Sonny for twenty-five years before making The Apostle. It is impossible to imagine any other actor who could play this role with the same power, the same nuance, the same conviction.

True Confessions: A Review

Here is what The New York Times critic Vincent Camby wrote about True Confessions when the movie came out in September 1981: “Quite simply it's one of the most entertaining, most intelligent and most thoroughly satisfying commercial American films in a very long time.” I have to agree that this is indeed an excellent film. While the film I recently reviewed, The Third Miracle, is really saved by the fine performances of Harris and Heche, True Confessions is nearly flawless in every aspect—acting, writing, directing, cinematography.

The movie stars Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall as brothers, the former a monsignor, the latter a cop, who become embroiled in a murder case in 1940s Los Angeles. Duvall’s character, an angry and bitter crusader for justice, clashes with the powerful but less than savoury friends of the archdiocese, of which De Niro’s character is the very ambitious chancellor. In the end, no one is free of the odour of lust and greed and the hunger for power. The monsignor becomes the scapegoat for the sins of the archdiocese and is banished to a parish in the desert, the same parish to which he was ordered to pasture an elderly priest whose self-appointed role as clerical conscience was more than his jaded cardinal could tolerate.

Camby:

As the single-minded Tom Spellacy roots around in his investigation of the murder, he finds links between the victim and Tom's sometime mistress Brenda (Rose Gregorio), who runs what is crudely though accurately described as ''a $5 cathouse.'' There also are connections between Lois and Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning), a big-time Los Angeles contractor and pillar of the Catholic Church, a fellow who is one of Msgr. Desmond Spellacy's softer touches. Jack Amsterdam, former pimp, now receives introductions to the Pope, builds church schools at cost and gets honored as ''the Catholic layman of the year.''

As the investigation continues, the connections become increasingly complicated and dangerous for just about everybody, except, perhaps, the urbane Cardinal Danaher (Cyril Cusack), who has made his archdiocese one the the country's wealthiest, and Frank Crotty (Kenneth McMillan), Tom Spellacy's partner. Crotty is a cheerfully crooked cop who takes small bribes but who would never railroad an innocent man to the gas chamber, as Tom might.

A web of sin and corruption connects nearly every character in this story; the tawdry and tainted atmosphere—noir on the surface but actually something deeper and more disturbing—is almost palpable. The innocent and wayward are the victims of the powerfully evil, and as the movie ends there is but a tiny glimpse of redemption in the self-awareness of the monsignor and the tentatively expressed love between the brothers.

The writing in this film is nothing short of superb. There is barely a contrived or artificial note in the entire movie and not one scene is predictable. When Tom Spellacy meets the parents of the murdered girl at the train station from where they will accompany her body home, he discovers a clue that will connect a big-time property developer to the case. The father is talking about his daughter and produces a small notebook in which she has written a sweet but sophomoric poem which the father begins to read but cannot finish. He gives the notebook to Spellacy who completes the poem and discovers on the same page a telephone number. In any other whodunit (which, of course, this film is not) the notebook would simply have appeared and the number found as the detective searched through it. Here, however, the pathos of the father’s loss completely disarms the viewer and overshadows the discovery of the number until a subsequent scene when a reverse directory reveals that the number belongs to the developer.

The characters, even the most minor of them, are fully drawn, from Brenda, the “$5 cathouse" madam, subtly and beautifully portrayed by Rose Gregorio, to the parents of the dead girl, who appear in only one scene. Unlike the caricatures of bishops we see in films like The Third Miracle and Priest, the cardinal in True Confessions, played by Cyril Cusack, is so brilliantly understated in his inhumanity we are compelled to believe he is real.

The performances of De Niro and Duvall, as well as several of the supporting actors, are also outstanding.

Mr. De Niro and Mr. Duvall are at the peak of their talents here. They work so beautifully together it sometimes seems like a single performance, two sides of the same complex character. But then the film is stuffed with memorable performances. They include those of Mr. [Charles] Durning and Ed Flanders, as the most prominent laymen in the monsignor's parish; Burgess Meredith as Seamus Fargo, an ancient, crotchety, seriously committed monsignor who's being given the expedient sack in the course of the film; Miss Gregorio, who has never before had a film role to equal this one, which she brings to vivid life, and Mr. Cusack and Mr. [Kenneth] McMillan.

True Confessions is more a morality tale than a classic film noir. In the film, the powerful and corrupt, whether they be businessmen or cardinals, may be clever enough or well connected enough to escape the judgment of the law, but they cannot avoid the final judgment—eternal damnation by the body of the faithful to the miserable hell endured by all cinematic villains.

Every time I watch this film, it stays with me for days. Highly recommended.