Have you missed Mel Gibson? It’s been five years since his last studio movie, The Beaver, stumbled through a painful, scandal-shadowed release; ten years since Apocalypto, his last directorial effort; and 14 years since his last “normal movie star” picture, 2002’s Signs. His career, no less than his person, disappeared into the abyss, leaving behind only the sound of his voice, coarse and drunk and vicious, cursing blindly at his girlfriend on one of the tapes that finally sent him into exile.
The exile was deserved. But it’s still been a huge artistic loss. Before his final meltdowns, the hauntedness of Gibson’s mind was hardly a secret: His manic, live-wire acting style suggested a man locked perpetually in battle with a devil, and his harrowing director’s work often felt like an attempted exorcism, in which the demons had to be revealed in all their gory plumage in order to be finally cast out. Some of the flaws in his art — the scenery chewing, the torture fixation, the tendency toward cornball and melodrama — were rooted in these deep internal struggles. But his demons were also clearly a fuel that kept him burning brightly, a source of the raw, distinctive genius in his films.
Comments