Easter weekend has become secular enough over the past few decades where many Americans use the holiday weekend to go to the movies.
It’s a trend that started with the summer blockbuster during the Fourth of July holiday and subsequently by Hollywood with premieres on Christmas Day. While COVID-19 put some of that on hold as audiences streamed movies at home, it seems to be making a comeback with the easing of the pandemic.
The gently gay-friendly Fantastic Beasts: The Secret of Dumbledore won the box office this past weekend, while the religiously-inspired film Father Stu finished a respectable fifth. It wasn’t a bad finish for a film that doesn’t feature a Marvel superhero and may find an audience in Western-rite Christians who were otherwise at church and with family this past Sunday.
Of course, this is a film that features a superhero of a different kind.
Father Stu is the true story of Stuart Long, an amateur boxer who eventually moves to Los Angeles in order to pursue an acting career and along that journey he becomes a Catholic priest. That’s the simplest way to put it without giving away too much of the plot for those who are planning to see it in the coming days.
The two-hour film, featuring Mark Wahlberg as the main character, gets a Rotten Tomatoes score of 45% based on 75 reviews by critics, but a 95% from verified users from the general audience. It shouldn’t surprise me that there is a divergence between media-market critics and the audience when it comes to movies that glorify faith. I found the story compelling, despite the vulgar language, but it is worth seeing.
I get that reviewers are entitled to their opinions. After all, that’s the job of a critic. But the coverage around the film, however, has been framed in a certain way, offering up lopsided and negative takes among many mainstream news sites.
This isn’t a traditional news-coverage question, but it’s appropriate to ask: What’s going on here?
Part of the answer is because the movie features Wahlberg and Mel Gibson, who directed the 2004 hit The Passion of the Christ. It was a film that reinvigorated a desire to make religiously-inspired films, but one Hollywood and the subsequent Academy Awards ignored. And Gibson, of course, is not your usual Hollywood A-lister, to say the least.
Gibson’s Passion project — brace for a sequel — was another movie that did not do well with critics, but was a major global hit among audiences. It remains, in my opinion, one of the best movies to watch during Lent.
It’s the news coverage and opinion pieces around the film, and in some cases specifically around Gibson and Wahlberg (who are both Catholic), that was troubling. Some of the coverage saw sinister forces at work in this new movie — with a focus on the past personal flaws of these actors.
This is how The Guardian chose to cover the film under the headline, “Father Stu: The Catholic drama aiming to redeem Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg,” in its opening three paragraphs:
Like it or not, Mel Gibson’s professional rehabilitation is gaining momentum. Ever since his career exploded in a mess of drunkenness, antisemitism, domestic abuse and a string of genuinely horrifying voicemails, Gib has slowly set about clawing himself out from the hole he dug for himself. It started small, with bit parts in sequels like Machete 2, The Expendables 3 and Daddy’s Home 2. It picked up speed with his Oscar-nominated film Hacksaw Ridge, and then hit a pothole with Fatman, where he played a grizzled and embittered Santa Claus. And now it seems unstoppable.
Gibson’s upcoming projects include a CIA thriller in which he stars alongside Jason Isaacs, a John Wick spin-off series and a Lethal Weapon sequel that he also plans to direct. But before all that comes Father Stu. And Father Stu will require some explaining.
Based on a true story, Father Stu stars Mark Wahlberg as a cocky, womanizing boxer who gets into a car accident, contracts a terminal illness and then becomes a priest. It seems like the sort of role that Wahlberg is seeking out these days to try to prove to the world that he’s a good person. He still gets to play a boxer and dress like it’s the 1970s (even though the film is set in the 1990s) but, like last year’s Joe Bell, it seems heavily weighted to counteract his negative public image. Joe Bell was about a father grieving his gay son; Wahlberg once angrily defended the homophobic remarks of Shabba Ranks and was “creeped” out by Brokeback Mountain. Meanwhile, this film is proof that people are able to change their ways for the better. And if the priest in this film can do it then maybe so can Wahlberg, a man whose history includes chasing black children while throwing stones and shouting racist epithets, and being charged with attempted murder after attacking a middle-aged Vietnamese American man.
The piece, by Stuart Heritage, goes on to say the following:
Perhaps I’m slightly biased towards Father Stu as a film. It has long been my belief that any character named Stu or Stuart in a movie is bound to be an irredeemable dick. Pierce Brosnan’s horrible character in Mrs. Doubtfire is called Stu. The guy who runs the Overlook hotel in The Shining is called Stuart. Matthew Lillard’s character in Scream was called Stu. There is a Minion called Stuart, for crying out loud. There is nowhere to hide.
But Father Stu softens the blow a little. Its titular Stu seems like a truly inspirational figure, a man committed to helping people even in the face of an agonizing death. He seems like he might be the One Good Stu. And, sure, the film he stars in looks terrible, like the sort of thing that will make the bulk of its revenue by playing in churches. And, sure, the director might be an untested 31-year-old. And, sure, it stars someone who has done so many bad things that it’s honestly hard to look at him. But, hey, Stus need to take what they can get.
Rolling Stone ran an almost identical headline in a piece under the banner, “Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg Seek Redemption in ‘Father Stu’ Trailer Instead of Real Life.”
Yes, there’s some kind of hive-mind there. This is what the piece says:
Depending on how you look at it, Father Stu is either a “brave choice” for two actors with rap sheets of violent, racist behavior willing to plumb the dark depths of their souls to tell a story of grace and redemption. Or, it’s a quick way to gin up audience sympathy and brush all that other stuff under the rug instead of doing the real hard work. Who’s to say? (This is also the second time Wahlberg and Gibson have combined forces, previously working together on 2017’s Daddy’s Home 2.)
Given that Father Stu hit theaters Easter weekend and is about redemption, I was reminded of the Oscar Wilde phrase, “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”
I have no issue with journalists going after the movie, the plot or the acting — but the life and past of Gibson and Wahlberg? What’s that got to do with reviewing this movie for potential viewers?
I’m not here to defend these men, but I can’t recall the last time the life of the actors in a movie became the focal point of most coverage. As a result, I wonder if Will Smith, fresh off his now-infamous Oscars slap, will get the same coverage the next time he has a movie coming out?
Political and religiously conservative media, on the other hand, seemed to have understood the film’s purpose and had few qualms highlighting the efforts to make this movie.
National Review, for example, found the positive — irrespective of Gibson and Wahlberg’s past — in Father Stu in the following blog post on its website:
I saw the upcoming Mark Wahlberg movie, Father Stu, early this week. I watched Left Behind, and that basically ruined Christian movies for me. Every once in a while, you encounter something different, like The Passion of the Christ, or The Chosen series. Father Stu meets their standard of excellence, but in a different category because of its language (and at least one completely unnecessary moment). But it’s precisely the rough nature of the film that gives me hope that along with Sony distributing it, and Mark Wahlberg starring in it, it has an audience that The Passion and The Chosen wouldn’t. People simply wanting to see a good story. I pray that a door to encountering Jesus Christ might be opened during the course of seeing it. I was in a movie theater this week for the first time in a long time. It’s worth it for Father Stu.
The Christian Post interviewed Wahlberg as part of its coverage of the film. Here’s an excerpt from that feature story:
Wahlberg spent six “slow years” trying to get to where the movie would finally be made. And when the time came, the project was filmed in 30 days during the pandemic in 2021.
After combing through many failed scripts, it was the script by Rosalind Ross that captured Father Stu’s true essence. So Wahlberg asked Ross to both write and direct the film.
The journey was not an easy one, though.
“I was met with resistance not only from studios to make this movie, but also from the Church, which I was really surprised about,” Wahlberg said. “But then I realized, they opened to Page 1, and Bill’s using the F word, and in Page 2, he used it again. Then next thing you know, ‘this is vulgar and this is unacceptable’ without really understanding what the message was.”
“I think if you’d left the 'Passion of the Christ' 20 minutes before the movie was over, you get the wrong message too,” the actor continued. “So it was important for us to just say, ‘OK, let’s go make the movie on our own and then bring it to them and then see what their response is.’ Then if it’s not, I will continue to grow to challenge why people are turning away, or why people are not accepting it because of various reasons or why this wouldn’t be accepted because of language?”
Wahlberg maintained that the movie is about “love, hope and redemption,” showing that “nobody is beyond redemption.”
Is nobody beyond redemption? It really depends on who you read when it comes to Father Stu coverage.
As for how good Father Stu is, you’ll have to see it yourself. I’m certain many Catholics will do so in the following days and weeks.
FIRST IMAGE: Publicity still of Mark Wahlberg, from the film Father Stu, courtesy of Sony Pictures