Mark Wahlberg, of all stars, marches for tolerance in the maudlin TIFF premiere Good Joe Bell
Film Features Toronto International Film Festival
It’s comforting that not everything is different this year at TIFF. The lineup may be smaller and the screenings may be online, but the programmers have preserved at least one essential hallmark of the festival experience: well-intentioned but drippy social-issue dramas based on true stories and starring earnest movie stars. The earnest star this year is Mark Wahlberg, and he’s been cast as the title character of Good Joe Bell (Grade: C), about a father who embarks on a cross-country walking tour, from small-town Oregon to New York City, to speak out against bullying like the kind his gay teenage son endured in school. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters And Men), the film has its heart in the right place, but its head is foggy and possibly concussed; it seems uncertain how to reshape its ripped-from-the-headlines story into satisfying drama—though that story may be broadly sad and inspiring enough to put it in contention for the Grolsch People’s Choice Award anyway, given the dearth of crowd-pleasing competition this TIFF.
We meet Wahlberg’s scruffy good-old-boy dad Joe on the open road, pushing a cart of clothes and belongings down the highway. By his side is his son, Jadin (a very good Reid Miller), who tags along to high-school assemblies where his father clumsily (and quite briefly) extols the importance of accepting everyone for who they are. Even when not on stage, Joe’s got one hand in his wallet, ready to pass strangers at the local diner a card advertising his anti-hate message. The screenplay, by Brokeback Mountain Oscar winners Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, intercuts this pilgrimage with flashbacks to months earlier, when Jadin came out to his father. Those who know the full story of what the Bell family went through will either be very confused by the film’s early scenes or suspect what it’s bending over backwards to conceal from the audience. I won’t spoil the twist for those who don’t know, but I will gently suggest that there even being a twist to this story isn’t the most tasteful choice.
For Wahlberg, the role almost looks like community service. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but he’s a Hollywood heavyweight with some hate crime in his past; seeing him play a character who’s walking the country to preach tolerance does create the temptation to read Good Joe Bell as a vague act of atonement-through-performance. Mostly, though, he’s not quite up to what the part requires of him—the mix of conviction and guilt that drives Joe’s quest. He seems right for the role only when the film is flirting, early on, with becoming a buddy comedy about a father trying to connect with his son; Wahlberg’s comedic chops take a little of the cornball cringe out of a scene of the gruff Joe surprising Jadin by joining him on the chorus of “Born This Way.”
Most of the problems with Good Joe Bell really stem from how it’s chosen to tell this tragic story. Though Joe is supposedly crossing America to educate and have empathetic discussions, the film devises curiously few encounters for him. (This could partially be a product of the fact that it’s hiding certain information from us for a bit—again, a dumb approach.) More detrimentally, the script seems reluctant to address Joe’s own homophobia; his march for redemption is supposedly inspired by the feeling that he wasn’t supportive enough, but the flashbacks mainly just emphasize Wahlberg’s signature, perpetual irritation at everything, barely communicating at all how he feels about his son being gay. Maybe that’s true to the real Joe or to many parents like him: Not every father who fails their kid during the difficult coming-out period of their life is a disapproving tyrant. But Good Joe Bell is a redemption story that barely attempts to understand why its protagonist needs redemption. It’s a paper-napkin sketch of a drama, the soul searching never shaded in.
When it comes to star showcases, I much prefer French playwright Florian Zeller’s first feature, The Father (Grade: B), which got a quiet reception at Sundance back in the blessed before times of January. Zeller, who’s adapted his own play, is tackling a subject that’s been covered almost ad nauseam by the movies: the difficult question of what to do when a loved one begins to lose their mental faculties. (We even got a horror-film take on the subject this year.) The hook of The Father is that it explores this all-too-common nightmare from the entirely subjective perspective of the person with dementia—in this case, Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), an elderly man resisting the assistance being foisted upon him by his grown, concerned daughter (Olivia Colman). Anthony insists he doesn’t need a caregiver, but it’s not just his memory that’s getting hazy; basic details about his life—where he lives, who his daughter is married to, what his daughter even looks like—have begun to blur.
Unlike a couple other theatrical adaptations playing TIFF this year, The Father makes little attempt to disguise its stage origins; the fact that the action is confined entirely to one flat is very much essential to the story’s design. (There are no tacked on scenes of the characters running off to the store to “open up” the material.) Zeller uses the intrinsically cinematic tools of editing and composition to enhance the disorientation, but the film’s central strategy to that end is straight from the play: Different actors keep entering, insisting they’re characters we’ve already met, while information delivered in dialogue is constantly contradicted. It’s a smart conceptual ploy that works to put us right into Anthony’s confused headspace, the film creating a frighteningly unreliable sense of reality. And The Father benefits immensely from Hopkins’ performance, which is among his most heartbreakingly vulnerable, in part because it briefly conjures the ghost of the actor at his most erudite and intelligent and dominant, than strips that away with the cruel indifference of dementia itself. Now that’s how you properly exploit a movie star persona.
48 Comments
So is Mark Wahlberg like the character in Heathers who shouts out, “I love my dead gay son!”
I IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT OF THIS, TOO
Good Joe Bell——————Spoiler Warning—————I have to say this is just another movie that truly ought to be about the gay character’s story (I mean it really is Jadin’s story), but is instead about the white, straight, cis male saviour, who unfortunately isn’t actually a saviour after all. But the popular white, straight, cis male actors need more roles (because you know, never enough roles for them), so it only makes sense to write a role for one so as to provide some credit for being a LGBT ally. It’s one of those award winning types of role….”Oh, isn’t he brave to play this compelling character, that is so different than he is” Let’s nominate him for awards! His “heroic” time period of life lasted all of eight months, but he definitely deserves a movie for that eight months. Whereas thousands of LGBTQI activists that have spent entire lifetimes fighting for equality, tolerence and respect, won’t guarantee enough eyeballs on a screen to warrant some sort of celebratory telling of their life story. Gotta make sure some straight, white, cis gendered folks will buy tickets, or why else bother to make movies at all?!?
What a bizarre rambling comment. Sorry all you think about is identity. That must be annoying and exhausting. No one owes you anything.
Not every powerful story makes a good screenplay. There’s plenty of activists with compelling stories and plenty of victims who deserve acknowledgement, but that doesn’t mean a film about them will be any good. Two hours of a child being bullied and then killing himself is going to be pretty tough to translate into a watchable movie. Regardless of whether it’s executed well or not here, a father facing a tragedy and then creating some good from it can be a screenplay. Don’t put some grand conspiracy of straight people behind the fact that the movie you wanted to see didn’t get made.
The
rating A.A. Dowd gave indicates a less than good film. From the info
provided it sounds like the writers had to embellish the true story to
include the twist of the “ghost” son, who travels with his father as he tries to atone
for his part in his son’s death, to try and make this interesting enough to carry a movie. This narrative confirms the trope about an issue that suddenly becomes important once it personally effects the protagonist instead of the issue being vitally important no matter the involvement of the white, straight, cis gendered saviour.
I also don’t think it’s an issue of the stories from the POV of the true
heroes or victims not being any good if made into a film because even
if the stories are equally compelling, it is all in the writing. A story
written from the perspective of the white saviour or the true
protagonist is only as good as the writer writes it.I certainly don’t suggest any sort of conspiracy either. The repeated featuring of white straight cis gendered protagonists in stories that are at the core about people of color, or LGBTQI people cannot be a conspiracy because that would entail having an intent or thought between all the filmmakers to have the same goal, and I fully doubt that. I think it is more a combination of studios and producers that generally won’t green light a film that doesn’t feature a white man (and sometimes a white woman) because they just don’t believe that film, however good it may turn out to be, will turn a profit. That is a story that has been expounded upon for decades. Add to that the majority of writers in Hollywood being straight, white, cis gendered males writing screenplays, and having no ability to write from any other perspective. Simple conclusion. What I am suggesting is that that ought to change, and the only way to do that is to stop letting that be the result. Complaining about it is the way to make the need for a different result known.As interesting as the writers thought a movie about a father who, after his child killed himself due to bullying, began a crusade against bullying of LGBT youth, but was accidentally killed by a driver eight months after his son died, would be. I think the movie would prove to be far less interesting as a thing if not for Marky Mark playing the father. I absolutely think it would behoove Hollywood to make a much more concerted effort to write good movies about the compelling stories that concern LGBTQI activists and heroes, as well as activists and heroes that are people of color, and to make those people the protagonists of their own stories. We need to be the the heroes of our own stories. If movies and TV show continue to mostly depict white saviours the take away is always that they are the only people that have agency, and can effect change, nothing gets accomplished if the saviour doesn’t get involved and allow change to happen. It is self-fulfilling results: No one wants to see movies that are not helmed by the white (wscg) man, so we can’t make them. If they don’t exist, what ever the excuses (writers can’t write movies that won’t be interesting to audiences), no one will go see them. No one can make a choice to see something that never exists, hence no one wants to see that.
You make some good points, but I don’t think the theoretical draw for audiences with a movie like this is that it stars a cis white hetero man, it’s that it stars a capital-letter Movie Star. And unfortunately, right now a disproportionate percentage of Movie Stars are cis white hetero men. I also think that, while Dowd’s review makes it sound like the movie doesn’t really work, the real-life story would naturally appeal to a screenwriter because of the “twist” opportunity. Maybe they failed in this case, or maybe it was impossible to do well, but I can see why somebody read this story and thought it could make a movie.
As a side note – this is one of the very, very few middling reviews for the movie too.
This would be a compelling argument if this movie didn’t seem very bad.
It’s had very positive reviews elsewhere -remember with AV Club you need to adjust for the agenda each time.
Oh shit, reviewers have opinions! Did your third grade class just get to their unit on media literacy?
What a childish and trite little answer.How sad for you.
I guess you’d rather have Mark in Transformers 19 than an anti-bullying, probably inspirational film targeted at the straight, cis males who are most responsible for bullying.
Yes, absolutely, that is the exact message you should take away from reading my statement (rant)!
That is if your choice is to be obtuse.
I’m gay, I’m more than happy to watch this story – we’re not one group of people that all want one thing.That’s what they think thank you very much.
I know I’m a bad person, but just once I’d like to read a negative review of a bad movie where a child actor isn’t singled out as not being a contributing factor to the movie’s terribleness. “Despite best efforts of John Leguizamo and Andie MacDowell, Mornwalk on the Allegheny is completely brought down by the maudlin and facile performance of six year old Declan Chance, who should, to use the words of his shitty little brethren, “‘yeet’ himself off of a cliff into a volcano.”(I’m sure Reid Miller does a great job here. Hopefully one day he’ll get the chance to act alongside someone who didn’t blind an elderly Asian man for fun.)
The good news is that he didn’t blind the man, he had previously injured his eye in combat. But going back before that, there’s a couple of instances of his throwing rocks at black schoolchildren while shouting “Kill the n———s!” when he was around 15. I’d like to think that he’s truly redeemed himself since then, that he’s no longer a racist piece of shit. Maybe growing up, getting out of Southie and away from people who encouraged those behaviors, and experiencing the world and interacting with people from different cultures has afforded him some empathy and tolerance toward others, and weeded out those racist impulses. In any case, I can take him or leave him, because I don’t usually like the movies he chooses to be in, and when I do, I’m not particularly impressed with him in it.
Dear AVClub- why do I constantly have to x-out you guys imploring me to subscribe to your damn newsletter when I’ve already subscribed to it just so I wouldn’t keep getting the ads telling me to sign up??
It’s a fucking catastrophe of design.I’ve set my adblocker to nuke the popup instances, which seems to have worked, but I cannot for the life of me prevent that transparent full page white overlay from showing up. So then I have to go into my adblocker again and click three times to dismiss the overlay, when I could only have clicked once to close the popup.
It hits me on the other sites, too, and I’ve signed up to those! The Root, Deadspin, etc.
Mark Wahlberg was great playing a version of himself in Boogie Nights and he had the right look to be an underwear model in the mid 90s… That was all 20 years ago now and the only thing I can think of where he was any good since then was a character almost anyone could play in The Departed. If I really need to see a 50 year old Boston dude who still looks like a high school wrestler at least Matt Damon is still capable of being okay every now and then. Can we retire this guy already?
I thought he was funny in The Other Guys.
David O Russell knows what to do with him.
I think Whalberg has clearly displayed that he excels at being “OK”. If there were any other actor I’d compare him to, and I don’t mean this as an insult, it would be an early-2000’s Nic Cage.
“excels at being OK” sounds like a contradiction. And Cage was well known for crazy over-acting before the 2000s.
I guess I don’t so much mean acting styles as I’m thinking of film roles.
I agree wholeheartedly in terms of most roles, but I’ll support him having a career making fun of his action star characters in movies like The Other Guys. His impotent rage and half-assed, violent responses to stress are a rather fun inversion of his typical military man schtick. I’d want to railroad him into comedies only though.
Ahhhh I’ve figured it out. Mark Wahlberg is really good in roles in which he can be childish (Boogie Nights, The Departed, The Other Guys, etc. ) and really bad when he is asked to be an adult
I like Mark Wahlberg in The Basketball Diaries, Fear, The Perfect Storm, Four Brothers, The Departed, The Lovely Bones, The Fighter, & All the Money in the World. But, after his racist attack on an elderly Asian man, I don’t see the need to cast him in anything anymore. Surely there are other good middle-aged white men to cast in films?
Yeah, while I do believe in “forgiveness”, I also think there’s a sort of ceiling that should be placed on certain people of privilege.
Meaning I don’t think what he did is the only thing he should be known for, but also, hey, can we stop giving millions of dollars to the living embodiment of a C+?
After his racist attack on an elderly man? That happened in the 1980s and has been known since then. I get that you’re sayin after you “learned” about it, but the way you worded it makes it sound its something he did recently.
The one in 1988? That he’s apologised for a few times and the guy involved even says at this point to forgive him?I’m no fan of his and I mean the guy was an asshole when he was a teenager , but at some point though if people improve you have to let them move on.
But, after his racist attack on an elderly Asian man, I don’t see the need to cast him in anything anymore.Didn’t that come before all the films you listed?
he’s racist marky mark from the funky bunch until the end of time. if he’s in a movie i purposefully don’t see it.
he’s the level of actor i expect from a former underwear model. he makes Orlando Bloom look like Laurence Olivier.
but if he was retired he couldn’t stop 9/11
he should have been retired before he started acting. Let’s never forget that he blinded a man during a hate crime. Mark Wahlberg is a piece of shit. Always has been, always will be.
Fine, whatever. When do we get an apology from Marky Mark for his violent racism? I know it was a long time ago, but he’s never really given any indication that he actually regrets it, and I feel like it’s something that should be addressed.
Goodness, Larry McMurtry (for that is how it’s spelt) is still working? Good on him.
Fuck Marky Mark. Always refer to him as Marky Mark.
we’ll call you whatever we want, racist.
Maybe they changed the movie radically in the time since, but I saw an early screener of Good Joe Bell eight months ago and it was not even C level. It was D or F level.
Cary Joji Fukunaga was supposed to direct this years ago. I don’t think even he could have gotten a good movie from that screenplay though.
SPOLERYSo whenever I read a review that emphasizes that a film holds key information back until a TWIST I wonder which character is really a ghost. Having looked up Joe Hill’s story, I’m wondering if the twist is that *both* main characters are ghostsETA: feel free to reveal any spoilers, I can guarantee that I will never watch this film
I’ve never let my being late stop me from posting a snarky top level quip, and damned if I start today:What is it, National Eyeball Tolerance Day?
The shit he did when he was young is genuinely awful, but that was a long time ago, unless there’s some more recent travesty that I am unaware of. There’s probably some restitution and good works he could be doing to make up for his asshole youth, but I’m not sure it warrants all this hand-wringing. Granted, I don’t feel all that bad for him. He still has all that sweet Transformers money to ease the pain.
His crimes were in 1986 and 1988. He was a teenager and served time. He apologized. One of his victims publicly forgave him and we don’t have any evidence of those attitudes, much less those crimes, carrying into his adulthood.
I’m going to go ahead and reserve the right to still ignore most of his movies while applauding his right to continue to make them.
Is Hopkins so consistently good that he is somehow underrated? Yes.