29. The Apostle

Generally, when a movie has one person as the writer, director, producer, and star, you might call that a “vanity project.” But The Apostle, Robert Duvall’s 1997 film, is anything but a vanity project.  Instead, it’s about humility, that rarest of Hollywood values. Duvall plays “Sonny” Dewey, a successful, slick Texas preacher who can’t control the gravitational forces separating him from his wife and family.  (Yes, that’s Farrah Fawcett.)

Sonny descends into an abyss, but he manages to crawl his way out again. He drives his Cadillac into a ditch -- symbolically baptizing the car and sacrificing it at the same time -- and loses himself in rural Louisiana. There he is “The Apostle E.F.,” building a small church off a dirt road with a microscopic -- but faithful -- congregation. The Apostle is remarkably honest, true-to-life, gripping, and even inspiring. It is, at times, perhaps too much like a parable, a modern-day morality tale, to be wholly (or holy) real, but Duvall has the rhythms and nuances of a great Southern preacher down pat.

What makes The Apostle work is love and enthusiasm and faith. It’s certainly true of Duvall’s character, who is filled with a spirit that is not just infectious, but authentic and painfully sincere, for once in his life. But it’s doubly true for Duvall himself, who poured himself into this project, bringing The Apostle to life, putting up the money needed to complete the film. It’s his faith in the power of moviemaking that enables his character to have faith in the power of preaching once more. And that faith sustains the audience, carries us through the movie, and leads us from the back row of the theater up to the altar, and will not let us down or let us go. (Curtis Edmonds)