I have a confession to make: After viewing Robert Duvall’s The Apostle, I
wanted to return—for the first time in nearly 20 years—to the pentecostal
church. I realized I miss preaching that overflows with gospel clichés and the strange
howl of people overcome with the Holy Ghost. I miss the big hair, the big cars, and the
big extravaganzas put on to "win back our city for Christ." For the first time
in a long time, I miss feeling the completely otherworldly sensation of being a
born-again, Holy Ghost-filled believer.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a believer. But while watching The Apostle,
I longed to be once again part of a culture of Christians who aren’t the least bit
embarrassed that their neighbors think they’re nuts for yelling at God all night
long.
The Apostle tells the story of Eulis "Sonny" Dewey, a traveling
missionary and the pastor of a successful church in Fort Worth, Texas. While Sonny is
singularly focused on winning souls for Christ, he is never one dimensional. Neither
really good nor really bad, he is perhaps a lot more like us than we care to admit.
After catching his wife (played by Farrah Fawcett) in an affair with another minister,
Sonny—filled with "spirits" of the distilled variety—busts up his
brother in Christ with a bat. The preacher then hits the road, stripping himself of all
the vestiges of his former life and baptizing himself as God’s apostle. Now calling
himself "the Apostle E.F.," Sonny ends up in a tiny town in Louisiana, where he
throws himself into building a church.
After a couple of radio sermons to promote the project, the white folks think his
preaching is too black and the black folks know from his preaching that he’s white.
But the Apostle E.F., with the help of a retired African-American pastor (played by John
Beasley), still manages to bring together a small, multiracial congregation that sparks a
spiritual renewal among the town’s people.
Though Sonny is a killer, he evokes sympathy because, in spite of his King James
vocabulary, he is a sincere man. He is also an intense, self-absorbed, and—we
suspect—egomaniacal pastor trying to pull the wool over his flock’s eyes and get
away with murder.
The Apostle is filled with God-obsessed men and women whose entire lives are
wrestling matches with God, the devil, and their own conscience. This culture of apostles
and teachers, prophets and prophetesses, healers and exorcists, speakers of tongues and
translators of tongues, and folks manifesting all other manner of gifts of the Spirit is
part of a "primitive" Christianity still existing all around us. As The
Apostle shows, this can be one of the most bizarre slices of life America has to
offer.
Robert Duvall, who wrote and directed the movie, put in years researching pentecostal
preachers and culture in preparation for The Apostle, and it shows. His depiction
of the Apostle E.F., with all his rough edges, is as authentic a portrayal of a
pentecostal preacher as ever offered in cinema. Still, after the project was rejected by
studios for 13 years, Duvall finally had to put down $5 million of his own money to make
the picture.
Though Hollywood will likely applaud the tremendous performance of screen veteran
Robert Duvall, I suspect The Apostle will be problematic for much of the
movie-going public: The film doesn’t cater to mainstream America’s amusement in
shallow bloodshed, and instead commits itself to in-depth character development. Also, The
Apostle is obsessed with an ecstatic, spiritualized form of Christianity that
isn’t especially understood by many Americans, or, for that matter, by most
Christians outside the pentecostal subculture.
While Hollywood has at times had a taste for "religious" films that deal with
social consciousness, such as Romero or The Mission, it might find the
rawness of The Apostle less palatable. While some more liberal sermons don’t
mention Jesus at all, the Apostle E.F. invokes his name a couple times per sentence,
including in the nearly 10-minute preaching finale, perhaps the longest sermon ever made
for a mainstream movie.
While such a simplistic faith may not be popular, The Apostle strikes a chord
dwelling within many of us for a spirituality that grabs our hearts and turns our lives
around. Many Christians on both the Left and Right sides of the aisle are tired of
experiencing their faith solely in political or social terms. A politically engaged faith
isn’t bad, of course. But The Apostle reminds us that humans have some needs
that only an encounter with the Divine can fulfill.
A low-intensity global revolution is transforming the way we live, work, and have our
being, and many are less than satisfied with the results. The fact that millions of people
around the world find solace in the answers offered in the fundamentalism portrayed in The
Apostle shows that this brand of religion is fulfilling a widespread and primal need
for stability and assurance that others haven’t been able to duplicate.
As our postmodern culture slowly dissolves all that we know and once felt safe in, more
and more people are crying out for that "ol’ time religion." Perhaps The
Apostle will help us understand that they can’t be all wrong.
The Apostle. Directed by Robert Duvall. Released by October Films, 1997.
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Gallegos, Aaron McCarroll
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