It's been 11 years since I began this series highlighting movies I wished more people knew about. I'm rerunning it from the beginning because I still think these are movies you might have missed.
The hardest soul to save was his own.
Robert Duvall gives a tour de force performance as a zealous Pentecostal preacher hiding from his past. Now in a small Louisiana town, Sonny goes by the name of "Apostle E.F." and opens a new church with the help of a retired reverend.Duvall gives us the story of a main character, Sonny, who is fully, tragically, joyfully human and who is always returning to God. Some of the scenes seem long but afterwards the viewer realizes that such immersion was needed to understand Sonny's world and soul.
At the end of this movie all I could think of was King David in the Old Testament. Beloved of God, loves God, inspirational, beloved by his people, and yet terribly a terribly flawed man who sent a trusting subordinate off to sure death so he could take his wife.
It is fascinating that Robert Duvall evokes these echoes in The Apostle, especially since watching the extras Duvall kept speaking of believers as "those people." He didn't mean it in a derogatory way but just that for him they are "other," a people who he is not a part of. He pulls it off because he's absolutely honest as a story teller and as an actor.
