The Apostle

I didn't grow up down South, or even in the midwest, but I do know a little bit about the Pentacostal Church and Christian fundamentalism. Robert Duvall is an ambitious actor and film maker, and The Apostle hits home with its perceptive and loving portrayal of country people in the United States. It is refreshing to see that culture portrayed as something other than gaggles of yahoos. The Apostle focuses on the community spirit of the church, and thereby shatters some of the mystery of its appeal in a culture as self-centered as our own. There are no saints in this story, just a protagonist and his supporters trying to make sense of a country in which there is little love and way too much usury. The film is harsh on a number of levels, very no-nonsense though drawn out at various moments. But it's real, and that's more than can be said for ninety per cent of what passes for films about U.S. culture these days. It's said by some folks that Robert Duvall has been trying to make this film for a lot of years, and there are parts of The Apostle that contain faint echoes of his 1983 project Tender Mercies. It hardly matters, since both are interesting films for different reasons. Some day we'll see Robert Duvall as the vast repository of Americana he really is, until then, The Apostle is one of the best testimonies to his strengths that I know of. Can I get a witness?