yellin’ at the lord
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Duvall
(writer and director) The Apostle /
1997
Sonny, moreover, is a gifted religious “performer,”
a natural in the pulpit with a way of embracing each member of his congregation,
no matter what be their racial background, as if each was a treasured friend.
Yet like many in his environment where guns and manhood are insistently
conjoined, he is a violent being within, particularly when it comes to the
opposite sex. After a night of “yellin’ at the Lord,” the former preacher gets
drunk, visits his sons’ Little League baseball game, and, in a moment of pure passion,
picks up a baseball bat and hits his wife’s lover, the Little League coach,
over the head, putting him into a coma from which later dies.
Through Duvall’s consummate acting and
writing we perceive that Sonny is the real thing, but like many a cinematic charlatan
such as Elmer Gantry, Marjoe, and others, he also knows how to establish and promote
his Godly credentials, paying to have his sermons broadcast on a local radio
station and purchasing and fixing up a broken-down bus so that he might promise
prospective parishioners that he will personally drive them to church on
Sundays. At the radio station he also meets a beautiful studio receptionist,
Toosie (Miranda Richardson) who is having difficulties with her husband, and
asks her out for a date.
You can almost smell Sonny’s lust, in the
sweaty Bayou evening, for female flesh, but, once again, Duvall gently
pinpoints the problems of Sonny’s culture as the man tries to make clear his
desires without scarring the woman off. Like a clumsy schoolboy he asks her
outright “how he’s doing”; after correcting him for his forwardness, she
assures him that she comprehends his emotions. Yet she, herself remains
standoffish and uncommitted and, a short while later, when Sonny observes that
she has possibly reconciled with her husband by joining him and her children at
a dinner in the restaurant where Sonny works, the apostle again reacts impetuously,
storming out of this place of employment, insisting he
will never return.
But even within his clearly committed
religious fervor, Sonny evidently sees no contradiction in his activities in a
radio campaign wherein he promises to personally bless the scarves—which
customers can put under their pillows to “sleep more peacefully at night”—he
sells to support his religious activities and, likely, his daily survival. This
believer clearly can see no gap between his Godly belief and old-fashioned
American commercialism. For Sonny, in other words, truth and mendacity,
believing and sinning are part of the same continuum, like yelling at Jesus.
Faith is an utterly human thing.
In the final scene, we observe Sonny at
work on the chain gang whose members have apparently already been converted by
the charismatic apostle, as they perform their assigned duties in time to the rhythmic
antiphon of spiritual music and Black dialogic rhetoric.
Los Angeles,
April 12, 2016
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