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T he 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?
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