First Reformed (2018)

This film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and that was it.  I have to say, Ethan Hawke's performance in this was very powerful and worthy of consideration for Best Actor.  He brilliantly plays an alcoholic Protestant minister undergoing a profound spiritual and psychological crisis, and it is a visually stunning, enrapturing film.  That said, I am not sure that I got the take home message.
The Rev. Ernst Toller (Hawke) is a troubled man. The congregation that faces him from the church’s spartan pews is minuscule. At night, alone, he drinks and begins to confess his misery to a journal. We soon learn what’s behind his agonized countenance: He was a military chaplain when he encouraged his soldier son to go to Iraq. The son was killed, Toller’s marriage collapsed and he was left cold and alone. His assignment at this church—which seems to do more business in tourist trinkets than souls—is equal parts penance and abnegation.
The world’s misery begins to intrude on his own when a congregant gets him to talk with her husband, who is an environmental activist with a solid streak of pessimism. In a long scene, the young man and Toller discuss the ways humanity is rapidly despoiling the earth and the planet’s bleak future prospects. While the pastor urges that there are still plenty of reasons for hope, it seems he may have been influenced by Michael’s words as much as the other way around.  It is a turning point for him, that God wants us to take care of his creation, and that the Christian thing to do is to fight for environmental regulation.  Which does not go over well.