Blood Father is a better return of Mad Max than last year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, because Mel Gibson, the original roustabout, comes back on a motorbike trailblazing a wake-up vision of himself and of America’s generational relations. In this action-plus-family tale, Gibson portrays Link, a repentant alcoholic and estranged parent who protects his wayward daughter from the drug-dealers with whom she rebelled. The premise is as satisfying as that of Liam Neeson’s Taken franchise, but with Link’s campaign through the trailer-park badlands of California’s Coachella Valley suggesting an Old West version of Hollywood. The wrinkled, bearded Gibson brings a history of likable derring-do, and, for some of us, he still carries an underdog’s goodwill.
Blood Father starts with contrition. Its title implies the mercy and clemency due one’s own — not just Link’s care for his offspring, Lydia (Erin Moriarty), but the compassion earned by a movie star who previously claimed one’s affection and has worked throughout his career with honesty and integrity. You’d have to go back to the Fatty Arbuckle scandal of the silent era to find a media-wide defamation equivalent to the obloquy Gibson suffered as a result of his Christianity-professing 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. (This is at the core of the national breakdown I described in “The Year the Culture Broke.”) Blood Father gives traction to Gibson’s career recovery.
Yes, Blood Father’s title also evokes The Godfather, and it is impossible to watch the conflict between this film’s self-conscious (almost Catholic) sinners and their law-breaking trials that test family loyalty without thinking of Francis Coppola’s gangster epic. The Godfather normalized moviegoers’ relationship to moral compromise — perhaps the single most significant cultural shift until Tarantino came along and opened Pandora’s box.
All this makes Blood Father more compelling than the Mad Max films or such prime Gibson vehicles as Lethal Weapon, Conspiracy Theory, or Tequila Sunrise. Link proves resourceful, whether dealing with drug fiends (Diego Luna plays the most treacherous of the Sicario), his partner-in-rehab (William H. Macy), or other ex-con low-lifes (Michael Parks breathing cold fire as a seller of Nazi paraphernalia). Link is battered, flawed, yet principled — a 21st-century man such as Lydia childishly left home to find — and Gibson’s star presence brings his torment close. “I broke a lot of things. All I can do now is not drink,” he confesses. This self-assessment links Link to the worldly criticism he gives his wayward daughter: “You have the mindset of a battered housewife,” and “You lie like a child.” Link and his daughter are both millennials.
Gibson’s parent-child rapport with Moriarty adds to their moral development. In action-movie mode, Gibson avoids self-pity; instead, the reckless side of his masculinity reveals how outside pressure can lead to self-destructive habits. Link’s he-man forearms bear a “Lost Soul” tattoo. This characterization has the frankness that B-movies boast over big-budget arrogance. Director Jean-François Richet crafts Blood Father as an efficient genre movie about the cost of rehabilitation and, as such, acknowledges the difficult, personal American endeavors that Tarantino’s films falsify.
At a press screening of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a not-bright film reviewer brought his teenage son, and they giggled and bonded over the freaky bedlam. Link’s defense of his daughter attests to different values. Although Gibson’s films always showed ambivalence about our culture’s relation to violence, in Blood Father, he offers a necessary reproof to Tarantino culture. So Gibson lets Parks (in a finer performance than he gave in Kill Bill) make an ironic speech exposing the culture’s ethical betrayal. Perhaps this principled insight is why Gibson was crucified.
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Another new western, David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water, further challenges Hollywood’s unethical trends. It twists the outlawry of two white Texas brothers, Chris Pine’s conflicted Toby Howard and Ben Foster’s ex-con Tanner Howard, into a study of millennial cynicism. The Howard boys rob banks in response to the recent mortgage crisis, which jeopardized their family home. Their actions are no less criminal than the banking system’s — as over-explained in The Big Short — but the impulses Pine and Foster act out and the reasoning offered by Mackenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan are more affecting. This film is a socially conscious re-think of the recession and — more strikingly — of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
No Country teased the specter of cosmic (and comic) nihilism, impressing audiences with cleverness yet leaving them desolate. But Mackenzie and Sheridan start out with a sense of home-grown desolation. They reverse the Coens’ process, bringing realism to myth and connecting the Howards’ anti-social grievance to the weary, old-fashioned pragmatism of white Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and his bi-racial deputy, Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham).
The film’s range of poor white, Hispanic, and Native American characters displays uncanny class awareness. (“How do you make a living in this town?” Alberto smirks when his and Marcus’s robbery investigation takes them to a backwater.) The tough American truths include a vigilante shoot-out that corroborates the gun-culture jest that opens Blood Father. Liberals might not like this, but it feels authentic and works as pure folklore. So do the brief, sharp characterizations of an amorous waitress, a defensive Comanche at a casino, and a no-nonsense old lady — each confrontation represents our divided personal perspectives.
All genre movies are contrived, but both Hell or High Water and Blood Father dramatize genuine emotion. Chris Pine’s intense, suffering movie-star blue eyes (as bright and romantic as Gibson’s used to be) match the gravity of Bridges’s and Birmingham’s lived-in humor and cynicism. Their complicated differences meet in a final scene — a moral draw — that defines how we live today.
Individual and communal American realities distinguish Hell or High Water and Blood Father. Toby laments, “I been poor my whole life. It’s like a disease passing from generation to generation.” And in Blood Father, screenwriter Andrea Berloff (Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center) reveals another political truth: “This country even turns radicals into commodities.” These two modern westerns confide the toughest Obama-era observations that Hollywood has yet dared. Better than the Coens’ slick treatment of hipster pessimism, these unpretentious B-movies speak truth to hipness.
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