The Apostle had some good points, among them competent actors, good production values and convincing locations. The noisy "Bible belt'" meetings were amazing to a foreigner, but nonetheless believable.<br /><br />However the inappropriate casting, mumbled dialogue, and the poor script and direction appear to me to be unforgivable self-indulgences on the part of the film-maker.<br /><br />Duvall was about 20 years too old for the role he played. The main character was supposedly born around 1936, and the cars in the later scenes were early 1980s models, so the Duvall character would then have been about 46. In fact Duvall was 66 in 1997.<br /><br />For this reason, it took me some time to work out that Farah Fawcett, 16 years his junior, was his wife, not his daughter or niece. In the early scene at the car-wreck site, the woman riding with Duvall, Anne Carter Cash, born 2 years before Duvall, appeared to be his wife. Nowhere in the film was it explained how she came to give birth to the Duvall character when she was only 2 years old.<br /><br />And while we are on that scene, do police officers at a crash scene really stand around on the roadway chatting while in the adjacent field the injured are dying in one of the cars, with nobody paying them any attention, let alone rendering assistance? I found this astonishing, and unconvincing.<br /><br />With a better script and a more competent director, and of course an actor of the right age, this could have been a good movie.<br /><br />Peter H.