Event: Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall, one of Hollywood’s most versatile and admired actors, has died at the age of ninety-five. He played any number of iconic roles: from Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979) to Gen. Robert E. Lee in Gods and Generals (2003), from Tom Hagen in The Godfather (1972) to country singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies (1983, his only Oscar win), from Stalin in the eponymous miniseries (1992) to Adolph Eichmann in The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996). Duvall was a writer and director, too. Back in 1997, he made a movie about a Pentecostal preacher, The Apostle. First screened at the Cannes Film Festival, it earned him one of his eight Oscar nominations, and even turned a tidy profit. It was a rare movie about religion that got very good reviews in major liberal newspapers and trade papers alike. But it’s also a movie no studio wanted to make, despite Duvall’s fame. They deemed it “too religious.” He had written the script in 1984. By the 1990s, he decided that if no one else wanted to make it, he would finance and direct it himself. This was before Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ, which crystallized the rift between legacy media and the broad American audience. But in the mid-1990s, the conflict between elites and “deplorables” was already the major divide in American life, from politics to religion. Duvall’s decision to make The Apostle had the character of a plea to the chattering classes to take religion more seriously, to find something human in it to appreciate, whether the struggles of life or the art of preaching. For Duvall, the inner experience of a sinner born again was more than worthy of careful (and faithful) artistic representation. Duvall grew up in a Christian Science household, but became disengaged…