The Apostle 1998
I just saw this last night and was pretty disappointed. I think Duvall did a great job of acting and the character was interesting enough. Not a terribly sleazy preacher like we usually get, but one who was flawed nonetheless. But that’s about all there was to this movie: one interesting character. I noticed they didn’t use a lot of music to cue the viewer into the dramatic parts and I wonder if this is one reason the movie seemed flat. It also went on entirely too long, especially at the end when you knew the movie was over but it just kept going and going.
The direction was bad. I think Duvall, as an actor, had too much confidence in his actors’ ability to express thoughts through a look on their faces. Thus you ended up with these lingering shots of people just thinking or experiencing something. I suspect this had more to do with a need to share the camera since this became an increasingly one-man show.
In the end, I think this wasn’t so much a movie as a documentary of Duvall’s research into preaching, and it was good just for that. Though he pretty much played his typical character for most of the movie, when he was preaching he became an entirely different person and you forgot this was even the same person. Sort of like Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump when I sat through the whole movie and never thought once that that was Tom Hanks.
Can’t give this more than a 7 out of 10.
RM>>I’m curious, do you think Duval, who wrote and directed this picture, was depicting this man as a “hypocritical hideous individual?” Because, while on some level he was “hypocritical” I don’t think that’s what Duval was going for. I think he was trying to show us the sincerity and realness of people like E.F.<<
I don’t think he was hideous or terribly hypocritical. I think he was human and had flaws. But I also understood that the character had a real calling. That he was energized by preaching. That’s what he was put on the planet to do and that’s what he was going to do no matter what else was going on in his life. E.F. was like a professional athlete. He was great at his job, but that expertise doesn’t necessarily carry over into the rest of his life.
Written: 22 Mar 1998