A Secular Saint—Will Oldham as Salvation in New Jerusalem
New Jerusalem, Rick Alverson (2011)
Will Oldham has served as a muse to a host of directors (Kelly Reichardt, Todd Rohal, Michael Blieden via Kanye West among them) whose modes of Americana embrace an appreciative but unvarnished empathy. His characters are acerbic even in their kindness: realistic but generally free of judgment on the part of the actor and his collaborators. This is the coup of casting Oldham, an intoxicating figure whose impish smile never fades in the viewer's memory even as his characters' motivations turn bitter or opaque.
Rick Alverson's New Jerusalem pitches Oldham as Ike, an evangelical Christian with a Virginia drawl, who wants to save the soul of his used tire shop co-worker, Sean, an Irish immigrant and Afghanistan war veteran. Sean is palpably suffering, plagued by panic attacks and unnamed maladies, seeking solace in psychiatry, verse, and drinking. We see him driving in silence, humming softly to himself: aimless and adrift, with a secret and painfully-expressed language. Their tender but contentious relationship delicately weaves between friendship, promises of salvation, and the uneasy feeling that Sean is being both looked after and recruited.
Ike's approach is often caustic and forceful until his eyes retreat into kindness. He is frightfully serious at times, but he can take a joke. His contradictions feel contextual; his care for his neighbor as effortless as his casual racism and xenophobia. The viewer's extratextual knowledge that Oldham is a revered, prolific, and successful singer-songwriter does not diminish the surprise of hearing his angelic but unadorned voice, effortlessly aloft in a fluorescent-lit church, blending with his father's as they sing after dinner, reading verses from the Book of John, cracking softly as he considers his salvation over a greasy BLT, and in hymn over the film's credits.
At work and in coffee shops, the two men wrestle over the work of staying in the light or in the dark, of getting "some of God's Vitamin D" on you. Scenes often end just before the tension or reaction that a conventionally dramatic film would stage itself around; the ungiven answers to Alverson's questions are thus present in the film's form. Can Sean experience God, community, empathy passively? Does inactivity or the act of resisting an outstretched hand demand greater labor than engagement?
New Jerusalem, Rick Alverson (2011)