Preacher Man

The Apostle is not the sort of film that gets made by Hollywood, not even when pitched by one of the most esteemed actors in the business. Oscar-winner Robert Duvall—the writer, producer, director, and star of The Apostle—tried in vain for 13 years to get a studio to bankroll his project. The film finally made it to the screen only because Duvall put up $5 million of his own. And once again, a film that Hollywood didn’t want to make has turned out to be really quite something: a low-budget wonder that has earned lavish critical praise and won for Duvall the Los Angeles Film Critics’ and the National Society of Film Critics’ best actor awards.

The marvel of The Apostle is that Duvall has fashioned a plausible, complex, compelling, and ultimately stirring portrait of a go-for-broke holiness Pentecostal preacher who, though grievously flawed, is not a huckster, fool, buffoon, or simpleton. In constructing this rarity, Duvall took on the puerile stereotype of Hollywood’s least favorite people, evangelical Protestants, especially of the southern white fundamentalist variety—a group it is safe to bash without fear of reprisal from the pc police. For Duvall, a lifelong believer, at least part of the motivation for doing The Apostle lay in his desire, as he put it in one interview, to “give credence” to a suspect people, offering a corrective to the incomprehension and fear of the nation’s culture-brokers.

The Reverend Eulis “Sonny” Dewey (Duvall) is the minister of a thriving interracial Pentecostal congregation in Fort Worth: not your homogeneous Church of the Upwardly Mobile. Duvall doesn’t soft-pedal the fiery theology or the fervent zeal of Sonny Dewey and his flock. Rather, the spare documentary style of the film accentuates the many rough angularities of the spiritual universe Sonny Dewey inhabits. For cultured despisers, and also for hordes of cultured believers, Sonny and his kind are a bit much. Indeed, for most moviegoers, Sonny’s realm of signs and wonders, blessings and providences, will seem stranger, and more incredible, than anything in Hollywood’s high-tech sagas of alien invasions and sinking superliners. After all, Sonny carries on an ongoing chat with God, and when he preaches, which is his gift and passion, he ventures to a place even more extraordinary and really cuts loose: he bobs, stomps, cavorts, shakes, chants, cajoles, cheers, whoops, and sings, all within the charged spirituality of his holiness tradition, a religious style and temperament that Duvall has spent years studying and absorbing.

And therein lies the curious problematic of The Apostle, both its allure and provocation, as it simultaneously intrigues and goads “conventional” believers no less than secularists. Duvall posits a world, minutely and affectionately detailed, whose beliefs, religious practices, and “taste culture” seem downright bizarre and freaky, the sort of lurid spectacle of emotional display gawked at by millions on tv talk shows and religion channels. It is a notable achievement, to be sure, for Duvall to bestow so much as even the possibility of integrity and dignity on Sonny Dewey, to give him an authenticity and genuineness that the media in general preemptively dismiss. But Duvall does not stop with eliciting a general sentimental “respect” for the “other.” Like his preacher creation, he too goes for broke. In the end, he accords to Sonny a kind of grace that must, by virtue of its inmost character, be divine. Little else could begin to explain satisfactorily what happens to Sonny.

That is to suggest that Sonny’s turgid drama, however unconventional, is ultimately a show that God not only directs but loves. First and last, it is Sonny who, as much as anybody, lives in the domain of the Real, however peculiar that claim may seem to genteel bystanders. The whole of The Apostle asserts in heavy-duty, dead-on serious terms that somehow or another there is a God mixed up in human affairs, and happily so, for what else would we do with people like Sonny or, more to the point, people in general?

From the start, Duvall emphasizes that Sonny is the real thing. All those pulpit fireworks aren’t there just for Sonny’s own exaltation or merely, as Hollywood would have it, to stoke up the parishioners or fill the coffers. His zeal flourishes as well amid the humdrum ordinariness of everyday life. In an arresting opening sequence, Sonny and his mother (June Carter Cash) happen upon a fresh traffic pileup. Sonny pulls over, grabs his Bible, skirts the police, and ventures into a field to evangelize a badly injured couple still trapped in their vehicle. Without so much as a how-are-you, Sonny prays for them and then indicates that because they may die, they need to meet Jesus right now. The conscious one assents, and after the police shag Sonny back to his car, he exultantly tells his mother that “we made news in heaven this morning.”

Clearly this is one preacher who really believes in God, grace, salvation, eternal life, and spiritual plenty, and those beliefs in large part mold Sonny: ebullient, irrepressible, obsessive, out-of-bounds, “convicted,” always on the hunt for “Holy Ghost power,” as he calls it. Scam preachers don’t bother with injured wayfarers unless there’s a camera around or a dollar in it.

Inevitably perhaps, Sonny is not all zeal and piety and is, in fact, far from being any kind of saint, and there the tension begins to build. Duvall knows full well that the intractable human creature is a “mutt,” as Sonny calls himself, full of tangles and self-deceptions, detours and vices, and perhaps especially so when visited by potent religious belief. Oftentimes, for sure, sweet-sounding “Jesus talk” actually works to cloak the elusive dark realities of personal evil, and that is the case with Sonny.

There are other women, temptingly accessible amid the intense emotional throes of revivalism; a violent temper when crossed; and an abiding worm of egotism. Sonny affects the marks of his trade: a big sedan, vanity plate, and white suit. Worse, he frightens his long-suffering copastor and wife (Farrah Fawcett), who takes up with the youngish youth minister and gets the church to boot Sonny. In a drunken rage, he hammers the boyfriend with a baseball bat.

Suddenly a fugitive, Sonny enters the territory of exile, estranged and lost, wondering just what has befallen him. By luck or leading, he ends up in a mostly black bayou town in Louisiana, and what happens there to this woefully imperfect vessel composes the major and best part of the film. It is enough to say here that Sonny Dewey travels farthest when he stops scrambling and running, and what he had forgotten, or maybe never fully knew, comes clear, at last.

Duvall plops the possibility of this tale flat in the viewer’s lap, or soul, for in the end, The Apostle really moves and then haunts. The usual term to describe what happens to Sonny is redemption, and that may be the right one, for there is much for which he has to atone and a lot he has to learn in mind and heart both. In any case, Sonny finds, or is shown, his way within his own spiritual tradition, and his redemption comes in discovering, or recovering, as the case may be, the pure glowing core of an ever-present radical exultation, the very insight that gave rise to his tradition in the first place.

In making his point, Duvall doesn’t hype epiphanies or contort events, as Hollywood is wont to do when it ventures near the religious. Here, the emergence of new life is neither sudden, dramatic, nor sensational but comes in slow, mysterious, incremental recognitions and gestures. By the end, something profound, loving, and final has taken over Sonny; he knows it, and we know it too. Light and Love have happened, even for the likes of a homicidal rube preacher. All should be so lucky.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College.