THE APOSTLE (God bless Duvall!) **

I thoroughly enjoyed the Thursday night viewing of THE APOSTLE. Great film to start my S&W experience.

This is a great character study of a man who desires to do good, but continually falls back into his old vices and follies. In other words this is the story of every Christian. If anyone watching this movie condemned the integrity of Duvall's character as being a hypocrite, then they themselves are equally guilty of their own judgement. Like I stated in our discussion, if this movie was done by a church, the character of Sonny would be flawless, or if he had flaws, he would repent 180 degrees from them half-way through the film and not be phased by them anymore. And if a secular studio produced this film, Sonny's character would be dragged so far through the mud of sin, that their would be no possible way of him finding redemption. Luckily this movie was handled by Duvall.

FINALLY, a film that shows the struggle of the Christian walk without sugar-coating or melo-dramatizing (I think I just made that word up) the spiritual experience. Robert Duvall should be heavily praised for sticking behind this film as the sole writer, director, executive producer, and of course, lead actor! He was pitching this film in Hollywood for years until some decided to give him and the film a chance. Now, that's commitment to a calling! And what a calling it was, the first legitimate and yet overtly "Christian" films I've ever seen made, aside from biblical stories. Why can't the Christian sub-culture look at this film and base their art off of this masterfully told story? I mean if they feel a necessity to portray blatant Christian-themed stories about Christians, then they better darn well do it right! But no, we don't see them following in Duvall's footsteps. We instead see poorly told stories like Facing the Giants and Fireproof held on a pedestal in our church communities. How sad. Maybe Duvall didn't speak about repentance enough, or maybe there weren't enough manipulated conversion experiences next to a cross. Whatever it was, this film seemed to fly off the radar of the church.

This pretentious Christian, however, believes this is the most truth-filled story of a Christian walk I have ever seen come through the mainstream pipeline.