When actor Robert Duvall died last Tuesday at the age of ninety-five, the entertainment media responded with widespread accolades. And deserved ones: dubbed the “American Olivier” by one film critic, Duvall’s power and range shined through in some of American cinema’s most celebrated films, including The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, as well as highly-regarded minor masterpieces like Tender Mercies and The Great Santini. (And, if you’re a nerd, THX-1138.)
One of those secondary entries in Duvall’s filmography that deserves top mention but is often overlooked is 1997’s The Apostle. Duvall wrote, directed, and starred in this story of a Protestant pastor who is forced to leave his Texas congregation and re-invent himself as a preacher in a Louisiana bayou town.
The film was a critical success, with special praise given to Duvall’s ability to capture details and diction of Southern Evangelical culture. Moreover, in a refreshing rarity, Duvall’s script never panders, never snarks, never judges its Christian subjects. These are offered at face value, expressing real faith and sincere motives. And their sins and failings are presented not, as Hollywood formula so often makes them, as another proof of Christian phoniness, but just as part of the mosaic of human complexity.
As Duvall would later write,
what was most important to me was to make a movie where Christianity was treated on its own terms, with the respect it deserves. Hollywood usually shows preachers as hucksters and hypocrites, and I was sick and tired of that.
Without exception, the actors pay off the script’s intentions: Duvall as the flawed protagonist Sonny; Farrah Fawcett as his conflicted and unfaithful wife; Billy Bob Thornton and Walton Goggins as two very different kinds of converts; indeed, the list of note-perfect performances threatens to include the entire cast.
My love for The Apostle, though, goes beyond its cinematic virtues and its honest treatment of Christianity. I think it’s impossible to watch the film and not be impressed by ways in which it bursts out of its regional Protestant motif and touches rich spiritual themes that a Catholic would find familiar.
WARNING: HERE BEGIN SPOILERS
One of these is a throwaway moment in which Duvall’s character glimpses a Catholic eucharistic procession on a river and remarks approvingly, “You do it your way, and I do it my way, but we get it done.” What may strike some as a false ecumenical note (one review at the time complained that he should be spitting invectives against the Whore of Babylon instead), looks more to me like character development on a theological level. On the run after assaulting his wife’s lover in a drunken rage, having re-christened himself as an “apostle,” Sonny seems to have embraced one of our Lord’s counsels to his apostles: “He who is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40). He has left behind his cushy, sectarian existence and embraced a broader and purer evangelical fervor.
Another is the meditation on marital fidelity. At first it might seem chauvinistic to call this a Catholic concept, but in an age where all of Protestantism has made peace with divorce and where segments of it increasingly seek to justify or downplay other offenses against marriage or chastity, I think we could very naturally view The Apostle’s treatment of these themes through a Catholic lens.
Sonny begins the film as a psychologically domineering husband who smirks about his “wandering eye” and admits to but downplays being a “womanizer.” Immediately after he beats his wife’s youth-minister (!) paramour and flees the law, he holes up in a tent to fast and repent, in a scene interspersed with a voiceover in which his wife likewise repents of her adultery and expresses a firm purpose of amendment. No therapeutic self-justification here; no revisionism of traditional biblical morality to suit the age.
Later, he finds himself attracted to a young secretary separated from her husband. He flirts with her and, sensing her own attraction to his charisma, begins laying what seems like well-practiced groundwork to seduce her (slyly mixing flattery with spiritual authority in ways that might seem disturbingly familiar). But his pursuit abruptly ends when he spies her and her family, meeting for a possible reconciliation, sitting down in a restaurant where he is working as a line chef. Chastened by the recognition of his pattern of sexual sin and its innocent victims, he immediately quits his job, vowing with pointed double meaning never to “look through that window again.”
Another thematic point that resonates with Catholic viewers is Sonny’s working-out of his salvation. Although he parrots the standard eternal-security doctrine, at one point telling his congregation that “once you’re saved, it’s a done deal,” I can only guess that this is meant to set up an ironic contrast—for his character traces an unmistakable arc of redemption through repentance, good works, and suffering.
Where he had been comfortably ensconced in the health-and-wealth gospel, dancing around his packed suburban Ft. Worth megachurch with a $100 bill held aloft like an idol, Sonny comes to minister to a motley congregation in a rickety abandoned chapel, working menial jobs to make ends meet and to buy radio time to preach. In his free time, he scampers around poor neighborhoods leaving bags of groceries on porch steps, mediates squabbles among his little flock, and plans a marriage retreat to help struggling couples. He doesn’t behave like a man who can rest assured of his salvation, but one who must labor furiously to pay for his sins.
Despite having ostensibly already been “saved,” and despite his repentance, conversion, and good works, it turns out that Sonny still must pay back the very last penny. Finally arrested for his crime—with just enough time to deliver a farewell sermon and to hand over his gold watch as a last offering—he is last seen on a chain gang, scything weeds and leading his fellow prisoners in a litany to the name of Jesus. He will be saved, but only as through fire.
What about Duvall himself? Though he seemed by all accounts to be a decent fellow, by modern Hollywood standards even a reactionary—grounded, patriotic, ruggedly normal—there isn’t much indication that he sought salvation through conventional faith or religion. But could his art in some way foster friendship with God? He recounts an experience, while doing research for The Apostle at a Baptist church, that “moved” him and made him feel “connected to the Lord.”
“Without warning,” he says, “something awakened within me that had always been there, dormant and untouched until that day. It was the greatest discovery I ever made.”
Robert Duvall, may you discover and rest in the Lord’s peace.