The Apostle (1997)

Featuring Robert Duvall, Farrah Fawcett and Miranda Richardson

Written and directed by Robert Duvall

There's a moment early on in Robert Duvall’s one-man show The Apostle that sums up nicely what it has to offer. Driving home from a sermon with his mother (June Carter Cash), Duvall's protagonist Euliss "Sonny" Dewey, a Pentecostal preacher, happens upon the scene of a grisly car wreck. Sonny pulls over and leaps out of his car, bible in hand. Heedless of the nearby police and rescue workers, he creeps up to one of the cars to lay hands on the barely conscious and bleeding driver. Sonny's mission: to convert this man to Jesus on the spot. When a highway patrolman tries to intervene, Sonny puts a boot in his face. A tear streaming down his cheek, the dying driver accepts Christ as his personal savior. Pleased with himself, Sonny allows the officer to pull him away.

"You think you accomplished something?" the officer asks.

"I know I did," Sonny says. "I’d rather die today and go to Heaven than live 100 years and go to Hell."

Here’s what this scene tells us: that Sonny isn't your typical grotesque caricature of a hypocritical preacher, the archetype upon which Hollywood relies. He's a true believer in his power to win lives for the Lord. The scene tells us that the picture is a character study, and not a patronizing comedy or a grim melodrama. And it tells us that we're watching one of America's greatest actors at the top of his form.

The film leaps quickly from this establishing scene into the details of Sonny's life. He runs a prosperous church in suburban Texas, but spends so much time on the road evangelizing that his neglected wife Jessie (Farah Fawcett) has taken up with the church's youth minister Horace (Todd Allen). So firmly does Sonny have his eye fixed upon Jesus that he can't attend to the needs of his wife, his two children or his mother, whom he leaves on the floor after an apparent stroke because he has a sermon to get to. And Sonny has a temper. After Jessie leaves him, he stays up all night raging at God: "I love you, Lord, but I’m mad at you!"

And when Sonny shows up at a church softball game to retrieve his family, he snaps. Moments later Horace is on the ground, having just taken a Louisville Slugger upside the head. Horace, it appears, will soon meet his maker.

But Sonny doesn't turn himself in; Sonny hits the road. Soon he winds up in Louisiana bayou country. He sinks his car in a river, throws away his identification, christens himself "The Apostle E.F."and sets his mind on a new goal: building a new congregation. His path leads him to a retired minister, Brother Blackwell (John Beasley), and together they fix up an old church, complete with a neon arrow pointing to the sky and a sign that reads ONE WAY ROAD TO HEAVEN.

Sonny immerses himself in the racially mixed community. He grows his flock and spins his preacher jive on a local radio station. He even turns his attention to a local secretary (Miranda Richardson), and seems willing to break at least one of the Commandments to get in her pants. Driven by the knowledge of the mortal sin he left behind in Texas, he becomes a Force Five Jesus Hurricane in Louisiana. Can Sonny make himself right with God before he finally faces secular justice?

The conflict between grace and sin lies at the heart of The Apostle, which now stands as one of the best two or three films of Duvall's career. While the story meanders, the sheer elemental force of Duvall's performance holds the movie together. Along the way he floods the frame with the Holy Spirit, including a marathon twenty-minute tour-de-force sermon at the climax. At times Duvall burns so brightly with Holy Ghost fire that he puts your average hair-sprayed TBN preacher to shame. If Pat Robertson hasn't seen this movie, he ought to— he'd probably retire from the pulpit and go sell insurance.

A lesser actor would have piloted this role right into the side of a mountain. But Duvall has always approached acting with humility. He never looks down on his character, and finds the core of humanity in every role. To study his performance, avoid the showy work of the sermons. Watch instead the subtle moments: the way he tries to coax a kiss out of his date, or the sly way he closes the skeptical Brother Blackwell on the idea of starting a new church. This is the stuff of legend.

To fully appreciate the depth of Duvall’s work in The Apostle, you need to know the story behind its making. You need to know that Duvall not only stars in it, but that he also wrote and directed it, and that after 13 years of trying to secure studio financing, he finally put up its five million dollar budget himself. Duvall believed in this film the way Sonny believes in the power of the Holy Ghost. In doing research he visited many a church and spoke with many a real-life evangelist; this preperation allows him to view Sonny's world from the inside out. He then cast the film largely with non-actors, who inhabit it so authentically that it appears as if he just stopped by one Sunday with a film crew and made up the picture on the spot.

After decades of watching studio pinheads fall over themselves to shower money on monstrous vanity productions and CGI crap-fests, it must have galled Duvall to approach them for a sum that wouldn’t even cover John Travolta's catering budget. That the film was made at all is a sign of hope for all of us who can't bear the thought of another Batman movie. And herein lies its real message: Sonny's determination to rebuild his church mirrors Duvall's determination to see his vision on screen. Faith is the answer: faith in God, faith in yourself, faith that good works do count in this life, and in the next. The Apostle will make you a believer— if not in Jesus, then at least in the power of great cinema.

March 15, 2005
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