Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson take another step forward in their exemplary careers.
Give Sony Pictures credit for releasing Father Stu in time for Easter, way after awards season. Instead of bucking for prizes, Father Stu earns serious attention for being the most emotionally satisfying American movie in years. Its stand-out qualities expose how secular and unsatisfying contemporary film culture has recently become.
Not so long ago, Montana rapscallion Stu Long’s pursuit of venal success would have been sold as a redemption story. Mark Wahlberg performs Long’s misguided impulses, so we see that the youth’s native intelligence and exuberant physicality are not being put to good use. The life trials of the cursing lawbreaker make an honestly vulgar tale. It’s against all likelihood that Stu becomes a priest. So, more than a redemption tale, it’s a lively series of miracles.
Wahlberg and his co-stars (including MVP Mel Gibson, who plays Long’s absent father, and Jacki Weaver as his abandoned mother) convey troubled American perseverance. Stu resents his parents’ failed marriage, acting out his dissatisfaction and frustration following a family tragedy. This contrasts with the smug, generational entitlement seen in social-justice movies. Stu’s irrepressible nature presents an ego so un-self-conscious that it’s a form of humility. “You’re so careless with your life!” his mother worries. His obligation to himself and to God are never sentimentalized.
Stu doesn’t know how to express his need for love, yet his grudge against the world is uncanny. It recalls the scene in Ingmar Bergman’s autobiographical script The Best Intentions when a parent asks a child: “Who are you going to blame now? Me, God, or life?” Stu gets on with his struggle, and his virile street smarts take him from the Midwest to Los Angeles (“carpetbaggers, communists, fascists,” he’s warned), where his film-industry aspirations are devoured by fate.
The Midwestern white boy is struck by a Mexican woman, Carmen (Teresa Ruiz), whose Catholicism syncs with Stu’s hidden, unarticulated morality. (Their karaoke of the country classic “Jackson” makes the love song a shared testimony.) But this cross-cultural love story — reminiscent of the ethical test that Clint Eastwood dramatized in Cry Macho — is only half the tale. Father Stu’s foreshortened narrative urges us to remember how Hollywood used to depict our common, one-nation-under-God characteristics. It quotes “We are spiritual beings having a human experience” from Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married.
Stu’s story recalls the Vincent Papale football legend that Wahlberg played in Invincible, but the spiritual biography of Father Stu, written cleverly and directed with discretion by Rosalind Ross, goes deeper. Wahlberg and Gibson’s innocent vs. haggard faces surprisingly reflect each other’s temperament. (Both actors have exemplary careers; if they were unscrupulous, they’d have played Batman and Robin.) The son-father tension shows hell-raiser heredity that split onto different paths, yet they’re innately simpatico even when clashing. Between the brash-to-humble son and his angry-to-sorrowful father, the movie confesses masculinity’s quintessential struggle. Wahlberg and Gibson reveal a mutual understanding of principled heroism.
How these characters strive to not fail each other is a theme that recalls Demme’s documentary about his clergy-relative, Cousin Bobby. Here, father and son achieve “perfect contrition,” as Stu is taught in seminary. (The lesson extends to his other relationships.) Their shared road-to-Damascus subplot is like the Western Red River but in modern dress.
Gibson, of course, carries his own legend, but this excellent, now-whiskered actor creates a truly complex character — an estranged husband who holds on to his wedding ring and a gun. As Stu suffers a fateful illness, the love and humility of a father–son reunion provides a natural spiritual metaphor to this mortal story. A series of atonements climaxes with Stu prostrate in church — it needs to be a great image but is, instead, simply a tender, powerful moment. Love, not sadness, is palpable. This is the rare biopic where the end-credits photos of the real figures match up with the spirit captured by Hollywood actors.
When the now-politicized trade paper Variety characterized Father Stu as a “religious film,” it was a dog whistle, stereotyping and limiting the movie for the heathen, anti-American film industry. Variety did not label Don’t Look Up a religious film even though its apocalyptic comedy very much derived from the climate-change religion that sees America as doomed. Father Stu shows as much religious regard as respect for patriotism. I raise the matter because Father Stu is easily superior — and preferable — to progressive Hollywood trash like Don’t Look Up. It makes every serious point (whether the mother’s agnosticism or Stu’s visitation of Christ) with vital wit. Father Stu’s decency about characters living in faith tells us, “Don’t look down.”
