Final scene in "First Reformed"...please weigh in

Saw "First Reformed", the Paul Schrader film w/ Ethan Hawke over the weekend. I've found that in discussing the ending it can be interpreted in very different ways. I'd like to hear what other folks think. But first,
my take...

Spoiler

Toller drops the poison only after drinking it, and the following kiss is strictly in his imagination. What also makes it more of a fantasy is that Mary is oblivious to the blood on his robe & doesn't get jabbed by the wire. He dies, cut to black.

 

There is a good interview with Schrader where he says he tested the film many times and kept editing it (even changing sounds) until the ending was as enigmatic as possible—he intended it to fall 50/50 in interpretation.

John K.

 

bump

 

Oh, good. I'm glad there's a thread on this. I just watched the film. It's very interesting, thought-provoking. The environmental message is very powerful. But as is implied by the subject of this thread, the ending is one of those 'What the hell just happened?' endings. I didn't know if what I was seeing was actually taking place. I thought that perhaps it was all taking place in Toller's head. Right up until the screen went black, I expected there to be clarification, but then the screen went black and the credits rolled.

 

I just saw it too. The ending is definitely ambiguous.

 

I saw this about a month ago and I'm still thinking about the ending.

 

I saw it last night. For me, it’s been praised more for what it says than for how good it actually is. And I mean the full movie—no opinion either way on the ending.

 

First of all I am not sure that the ending can be discussed in a helpful way without including spoilers. Let's just say that as I see the ending it does not show Reverend Toller doing one of the things asserted in the OP's spoiler.

The film has other influences, but is a mix primarily of two very different films that happen to both be among my favorites. One is Taxi Driver, which Schrader of course was directly involved with the writing of, and the other is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light. Concerning the OP's focus on the end of First Reformed both those films also had open ended endings.

But less clear is whether those films were without clues as to the better understanding of them. For example in Taxi Driver some wonder if the final scene, giving Cybill Shepard a ride in the cab, was a fantasy. I tend to think not, although it is easy to see why Travis would fantasize about just such an ending. But overall I don't see how seeing it as something that did not "really" happen adds much. (Some even wonder whether the whole film after the shootout is some sort of fantasy, with Travis having died already. But that is too much a digression here.)

For Winter Light the ambiguity is more philosophical, as in whether we are witnessing Tomas the minister beginning to renew his faith, while simultaneously finding comfort, love?, in his relationship with Karin. I tend to understand WL as being more optimistic in such regard. Meanwhile the question of "optimism" in Taxi Driver is much more complex at least in the sense whether we have witnessed a turnaround in Travis's mental condition.

Did Schrader in First Reformed consciously try and find an ending that mixed the endings of Taxi Driver and Winter Light? Well, certainly as in Taxi his mental condition and its effect on his relationship to society are very much an issue, while like in Winter Toller's relationship with a woman is central to, or at least tied very much up in, his search for meaning. But I concede I don't know or have anything other than a hunch on which to think Schrader might have been thinking along those lines.

But for me as a member of the audience, thinking that Toller would have only turned around his downward mental deterioration in death, or answered his search for meaning with a fantasy, are both unhelpful and unsatisfying. I think to the contrary that Schrader has purposely said what he has said about the ending because he does not want to spoon feed people with an answer and did not want to make it too easy on the viewer to come up with an answer while watching the film. But in doing so he still had a "better" understanding of what happened in mind.

Ftr I do not always prefer the literal understanding of what we are shown, or perhaps of more relevance only prefer the literal to the symbolic meaning of what we are shown. Having said that...

Spoiler: Spoiler on Ending

Toller is shown dropping the glass without drinking from it. It is the sight of Mary which triggers this. She is there because she cares, and he knows it, knew it when he saw her in the church, but now she in effect confronts him with it. Her presence requires both that he make a choice between his violent options and her, and also requires him to choose what he values more, meaning through his death in service of some purpose or of life however brief with her. He in both cases chooses her. His apparent (and I say that purposely - we simply do not know how certainly soon his demise is) fatal illness is in that regard actually a bit of a fake out. He still has at least some time left with her. In short he finds redemption in care from her and caring for her.

 

Which is 100% fine with me. I actually enjoy leaving a movie with a completely ambiguous ending. I never feel I "have" to know the "truth" about an ending. It's more fun to postulate the possibilities and just realize we weren't meant to know.

 

One clue -- it's clearly shown that the door to the parsonage is locked.

 

Maybe she came in through the bathroom window?

 

Protected by a silver spoon?