The Apostle

BySheikh Javed Mansuri
The Apostle

A sensitive cultural ethnography of the exotic, much-maligned world of Southern Pentecostalism; a complex study of a character whose many contradictions startlingly combine sacred and profane dimensions; a spiritual exploration of the inscrutable workings of guilt and grace: The Apostle—long labored over by writer, director, producer, and star Robert Duvall—is all of these.  
 
Duvall’s film contemplates the trajectory of Eulis “Sonny” Dewey, a charismatic holiness preacher from rural Texas whose utter confidence in Jesus is unshaken by his proneness to womanizing, domineering behavior and anger—until mounting crises and a shocking act of violence set his life spinning out of control. On the run in the backwoods of Louisiana, Sonny makes an extraordinary overture for redemption, taking on a new identity and devoting himself almost recklessly to the work of God.  
 
Duvall persuasively brings Sonny’s contradictory elements together to create a convincingly realized portrait of a man with whom we cannot quite sympathize nor quite condemn, a man who wrestles with God with the emotion and frankness of a Job, yet without Job’s righteousness. To humanize and indeed to locate the hand of grace in this unpromising figure and his unfashionable world is an act of faith and art worthy of Flannery O’Connor. The documentary-like tone is aided by a non-professional supporting actors cast from the culture depicted onscreen. 

—Steven Greydanus (2011)

  1. Directed by: Robert Duvall
  2. Produced by:Rob Carliner Steven Brown Robert Duvall
  3. Written by: Robert Duvall
  4. Music by: David Mansfield
  5. Cinematography by: Barry Markowitz
  6. Editing by: Stephen Mack
  7. Release Date: 1997
  8. Running Time: 134
  9. Language: English

Arts & Faith Lists:

2005 Top 100 — #11

2006 Top 100 — #16

2010 Top 100 — #32

2011 Top 100 — #22

2020 Top 100 — #35

Similar Posts

  • Faust

    BySheikh Javed Mansuri

    A useful starting point when approaching Friedrich Wilhelm (F. W.) Murnau’s Faust is Rembrandt’s 1652 etching of the same name. In it, we see Faust alone in his library, poring through parchments, surrounded on all sides by scientific paraphernalia. But Rembrandt pays little attention to the things in the room and, instead, directs our focus toward Faust’s desperate…

  • Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

    BySheikh Javed Mansuri

    It seems hardly coincidental that two films on the life of children’s television host and ordained Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers were released in as many years.  A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), a feature starring Tom Hanks and directed by Marielle Heller, was nominated for the Top 100 but didn’t make the cut.  Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary, Won’t…

  • The Grapes of Wrath

    BySheikh Javed Mansuri

    John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath opens with a view of the “scarred earth,” then lifts its eyes to consider the scarred people that lived on that earth.  It finds these people staggering through the Dust Bowl storms that struck the Southern U.S. in the 1930’s.  This early passage from the novel seems to lay bare the…

  • Rashômon

    BySheikh Javed Mansuri

    Taking shelter from a torrential rainstorm in a demon-haunted temple, two men struggle to comprehend the story of a murder. They have witnessed crimes before, but something about this one has left them shell-shocked. One of them laments, “This time, I may finally lose my faith in the human soul.”   What follows in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is…

  • Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

    BySheikh Javed Mansuri

    Marc Rothemund’s fact-based Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a riveting portrait of a young woman of formidable intellect, dogged self-possession, and excruciatingly steady nerves. At 21, Sophia Magdalena Scholl (Julia Jentsch) is old enough to have outgrown the brash overconfidence of immaturity, but not too old for the purity and ardor of youthful idealism. She is…