NETFLIX: Triple Frontier (J.C. Chandor, USA, 2019)

The war on drugs, having grown into the size and scale of a “traditional” war, has established as a perfect example of a never-ending conflict. The United States government sends advisors whose advice doesn’t improve the conditions of the Latin American countries that have been torn apart by violence and institutional corruption. Private security companies reap a profit as well, but it is a soul-wrecking job for men like Santiago “Pope” García (Oscar Isaac), a weary advisor who leads the most recent assault against the operations of drug lord Lorea. Police officers are taken down by bazookas and heavy fire, before Santiago wins the fight with a precise, calculated firing of his grenade launcher. Precision is one of the major motifs in this story, and it appears constantly, imbuing every aspect of the action scenes. Santiago wins the fight for the country’s police, which proceed to execute most of their prisoners, after one of them begs for his life declaring that he knows that Lorea is hiding in the jungle, in a house that holds all his cash money. Santiago verifies this information with his informer, the beautiful Yovanna (Adria Arjona) whose brother has become involved in Lorea’s business. Yovanna wants herself and her brother out of Lorea’s grip, while Santiago wants out of his life, wishing to cash out with two big scores: killing Lorea and taking his money as a final payment for a lifetime of thankless soldiering.

Santiago assembles a team, Seven Samurai style, of former Special Forces comrades with whom he wishes to share the money and a final successful mission. Francisco “Catfish” Morales (Pedro Pascal), a pilot that is both grounded in personality and grounded by the revoking of his license after a cocaine-smuggling charge; Martial arts expert Ben Miller (Garret Hedlund) who moonlights as an MMA fighter; and Ben’s brother Captain William “Ironhead” Miller (Charlie Hunnam) a blood-knight who relishes his skills and lifestyle as a “warrior”, and who has trouble adjusting living to a civilian lifestyle, especially when he’s prone to strangling people for not moving their carts at grocery store. William’s reputation precedes him as he makes a living in the pep-talk circuit in different army bases, when Santiago comes forward with his offer to take out Lorea and take his money. William will join him as long as he convinces Captain Tom “Redfly” Davis to join them. Tom is a divorced father who fails at selling crappy condos, and who struggles to pay his alimony. He is the tactician of the team, and he has a Sherlockian mind. He is very hesitant to join Santiago, but his lack of money, family obligations and peer pressure finally convince him to advice the team and join them.

Triple Frontier is a military heist movie disguising a Greek tragedy about fate, greed and the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives in order to motivates us. The team’s plan moves forward and J.C. Chandor (director of the great A Most Violent Year, Margin Call and All Is Lost) directs these scenes with a purity of style and clearness, his suspense scenes allowed to breathe and develop in due time. The action scenes are realistic as mentioned, quick and precise. Triple Frontier is an action movie that eschews all the vices of action movies of the 21^st century: there are no constant extreme close-ups, jittery cam, quick editing, confusing geography. Everything is as clearly framed as a drama, because that’s what it is. Things go right for the team, and then things do not, unravelling piece by piece. One is caught in a hurricane of emotions: on the one hand and by the nature of the genre, we expect our protagonists to achieve their mission and get the money that they feel they deserve, and we empathize with them. But once we catch glimpses of some of their darker sides and they make some brutal choices, our loyalty as viewers vacillates. And that is a perfect summary of the relationship between the way we romanticize soldiers and what they actually do. At one point, the characters point out that without having a flag on their shoulders, everything they do will be considered murder and robbery. The line is that thin.

In Chandor’s and Mark Boal’s script, things are not clear-cut, and even some narrative aspects are purposefully kept in the dark. Tom suspects that Yovanna might be lying about her relationship with Santiago. She insists she is telling the truth. Tom moves on, but he still believes that she is lying to cover up something. This suspicion is not solved, but is one of many such aspects of the movie that makes it interesting. The number of tragedies and accidents that occur in the film cannot be clearly traced to a single source, besides the fact that the mission should not have been undertaken in the first place. Every character’s personal flaws and motivation help carve the tragic path of each character. Tom wants the money to take care of his family and not feel like a civilian loser to the point that he ignores his logical side; William is so overcome by his warrior’s pride and by his identity as a man of violence that he takes decisions based on this idea of himself; Santiago talks about wanting to take out Lorea because he’s a virus that has infested the country, and he wants to take the money out of a sense of entitlement for his years of service as an agent of the world’s police, but killing Lorea won’t stop the war on drugs or institutional corruption—and he will be replaced by one or more men like him, or worse—and his justification for taking drug money is extremely thin. I must admit that I was disappointed in the casting of Lorea, because I didn’t find him an intimidating or memorable presence, but that’s also the point: he’s a generic villain, just another drug kingpin among hundreds. The true antagonist of the movie is each character’s foibles and Providence itself, which gives and takes as it sees fit.

A film where every character choice matters and every action has a consequence, Triple Frontier is unlike many films today. Shot in gorgeous locations and with a classical sense of framing and editing, it is a worthy follow-up for great Netflix movies like The Outlaw King. This is a movie I wished I could have seen in the big screen. I liked it that much. In the meantime, I will enjoy repeat viewings of this thrilling modern-day version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

"First Reformed" (Paul Schrader, USA, 2018) Essay

Para leer una versión en español, HAZ CLICK 

The state of our world invites us to embrace despair. The criminal inaction, aiding and abetting, of people in power regarding the tremendous environmental and economic crimes by conglomerates drive the world further into a situation that a few years from now will foster a new, unsustainable existence for the majority of people. This is the fear of Michael (Philip Ettinger) an environmental activist released from prison after participating in a non-violent rally. His wife, Mary (Amanda Seyfrid) is worried about him and has invited her pastor, Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) to counsel Michael. Michael doesn’t want to bring a child into a world that seems on the brink of complete chaos. Reverend Toller listens to him, agrees with him regarding the planet’s situation, but tells him that her child has as much as a right to exist as any other creature, like plants or endangered species. He tells him that while climate change is a recent development, what Michael feels now, the “blackness”, has been a constant part of human experience since the beginning of man’s capacity for reason. “Wisdom,” the pastor says, “is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously, Hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself.”

This sequence is set in an early part of Paul Schrader’s astonishing masterwork First Reformed, a film that sees the erudite screenwriter—one of cinema’s scribes most preoccupied with spiritual malaise and the desire for redemption even for the most wretched of men—back in shape after decades of working in, mostly, B-movies with C-level scripts. First Reformed is pure, undiluted Schrader. His Calvinist upbringing combined with his understanding of Catholic theology (and even a dash of his affection for Japanese culture and cuisine) is in full display. It’s no secret that he is influenced by Bergman, Bresson and Tarkovsky (with whom he shares both visual style and thematic preoccupations) and by the literary works of Mishima and Georges Bernanos, whose Diary of a Country Priest (also a film by Bresson) is a heavy influence on the film’s structure. Despite his attempts at helping Michael, Toller is a physician unable to heal himself. He suffers from doubt, guilt and the inability to engage more actively with people around him. The film opens with him starting a journal for a year, in the hopes of strengthening his connection with God, engaging in a form of prayer. He intends to shred and burn the diary after twelve months. However, even this exercise, which he shares with us through voice-over, seems to be futile. He is always unsatisfied with his writings and his descriptions. He says that one should always be merciless when writing about oneself, but he’s more merciless about his choice of words than in his actions.

Toller was a former chaplain, another in a long line of soldiers. He encouraged his son to enlist in the war in Iraq, even though he knew that the war had no moral justification, solely so his son could continue a family tradition. This results in his son’s death and in the end of his marriage. He finds employment and a chance at making things better at First Reformed, a historical church in New York that is now part of Reverend Joel Jeffers (Cedric “the Entertainer” Kyles) religious empire. Jeffers preaches out of a Megachurch that is fully staffed and includes a studio, a cafeteria, counselors and youth groups. Jeffers is an erudite learner of scripture, charismatic and a canny businessman. While Toller is relegated to doing services for a handful of congregants and acting as a tour guide for the occasional tourist or school group, Jeffers engages with a larger audience. What’s more, both the megachurch and First Reformed receive the backing and help of Erik Balq (Michael Gaston), the CEO of Balq industries, which, among other things, is also in the energy business and is one of the top polluters in the country. He also happens to finance the restoration and refurbishment of the First Reformed church for its 250^th anniversary.

It is in this context that Toller’s spiritual crucible increases. Tragedy strikes into the center of Toller’s church community and his spiritual crisis only gets worse. Afflicted by stomach pains, Toller remains quiet about them and keeps on drinking whiskey while writing his journal in his barely furnished bedroom. Esther (Victoria Hill), the choir director at the megarchurch, is in love with Toller and notices his ill-health, but Toller balks at her attempts to help him. The only thing that seems to give him a momentary reprieve from his pains is his relationship with Mary, seemingly of a pastoral nature, and his increasing fixation with the environmental issues that Michael is concerned about. Eventually, Toller starts to become consumed with these worries, and ponders taking drastic action.

Schrader has always concerned himself with stories about men who say little, but who are imprisoned by overpowering obsessions, which they try to placate with self-punishment, hard physical regiments and a wish to exert change in their world through an act of purifying, suicidal violence. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is the well-known example, but one can also see these characters in Rolling Thunder, Raging Bull, Mishima: A life in Four Chapters. The parallels with these previous creations are strong enough that one could also see First Reformed as a remake of Taxi Driver, with Toller as some sort of Pastor Bickle (there’s even a scene where Toller pours some stomach medicine into his whiskey that is a great visual parallel with the scene where Travis stares at the bubbles from his Alka-Seltzer). But there are aspects about this film that make it enthralling on its own. For one, the film is very dialogical, with scenes of theological debating that are as sharp and brutal as any action scene. There is an undercurrent of pitch black comedy that can make one chuckle with bitterness, especially regarding some of Toller’s halfhearted attempts at being ingratiating with people, despite the terror that suffocates his very soul.

What’s also astonishing about the film is how sharp Schrader’s writing and perception regarding the state of modern political culture. The conflict in the film centers, finally, on the moral and ethical relationship between the genuine Christian mission and the stranglehold that American capitalism has upon its actual delivery. While on a youth group session, one of the young men spitefully rejects Toller’s argument against the idea that Christian righteousness begets prosperity. The young man argues that Toller’s vision of Christianity is a loser’s religion and begins to enumerate a serious of reactionary American grievances: “Take prayer out of the schools. Give money to people too lazy to work for it. And whatever you do, don't offend the Muslims.” Toller is baffled by this, for he realizes that despite the notion of Christian identity in America, Christian ideals regarding poverty, pacifism and meekness are not very marketable. There are moments of great visual irony, but my favorite takes place at the megachurch’s cafeteria. Toller and Esther sit at a table, and behind them we see lines from Acts of the Apostles (44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people) that strike quite the contrast with the notions put forth by evangelists like Jeffers or “Pillars of the Community” like Balq.  The pragmatic Jeffers scolds Toller about being divorced with the practical side of their mission, telling him that writers like the monk Thomas Merton spent their lives in isolation, writing books, and not dealing with the practical realities of reaching souls. But the reality is that the vision of Christianity that is peddled by the mainstream is responsible for creating a world where the stewardship of the Earth is considered a political Liberal vs Conservative ideal and where politicians and moneymen use their money and influence to keep the religious power players happy and the believers dormant. It’s in this scenario where Toller finally asks, again and again, “Will God Forgive Us?”

First Reformed is a powerful, crushing experience of a film. It is a film that invites reflection and also confronts us about what it means to be a Christian in relation to the state of the world and how sometimes taking on the world’s problems all by ourselves can lead to egotism that can turn violent. It is a great film that doesn’t offer clear-cut solutions, as it should be. Just as Toller narrates “How easily they talk about prayer, those who have never really prayed”, sometimes what seems to be an easy task cannot be achieved without facing down the darkness of the soul within us.