Father Stu

 

Father Stu

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Jacki Weaver, Mel Gibson, Teresa Ruiz

Directed by Rosalind Ross

Mark Wahlberg has begun to take the biopic circuit when it comes to his recent projects, and he's chosen some interesting real-life people to portray. Last year's "Joe Bell" saw Wahlberg playing the titular character, a man who planned to walk across America to raise awareness after his gay son was bullied in school, but he portrayed Bell as a bit of a hothead that when even he was trying to do the right thing, came off as wrong. "Father Stu" is his next outing in the biopic genre, playing Father Stuart Long, a man who began the film on one end of the religious spectrum and wound up on the other by the end of it, but much like "Joe Bell," his portrayal of Father Stu seemed a bit off-putting.

Stuart Long (Mark Wahlberg) is a washed-up boxer living in Montana, and he doesn't seem to have a direct path in life. His father Bill (Mel Gibson) is an unsupportive drunk, and his mother Kathleen (Jacki Weaver) is caring enough, but is still dealing with the loss of her other son when he was six years old. Stuart decides to move to Los Angeles to become an actor, but ends up working at a grocery store instead, where he meets Carmen (Teresa Ruiz), and falls instantly in love with her. He finds her at the local Catholic Church and she at first rebuffs his advances because she's a devout Catholic and he wants nothing to do with God, but he slowly starts warming up to the religion to get closer to her.

Then one night he gets into a motorcycle accident and ends up in a coma, where he has a vision of the Virgin Mary who tells him that he can't die in vain, and he pulls through with a miraculous recovery. He decides that this is the turnaround he needs, and decides to become a priest, to the chagrin of his mother, father, and Carmen, who wanted to marry him. He gets into a seminary and turns his life around, and begins a relationship with his father after a tumultuous upbringing, but things take another turn when he's diagnosed with inclusion body myositis, a rare muscular disease similar to Lou Gehrig's disease, which slowly deteriorates the body's muscles. Seeing this as an opportunity to grow closer to a suffering Christ, Stu uses this disease to reach out to people and touch countless lives, as well as his own and his family's.

While the premise of the film sounds like an up-roaring feel-good inspirational tale, it doesn't quite stick the landing, serving more as a passion project for Wahlberg and Mel Gibson - both devout Catholics - and preaching to the choir instead of converting new parishioners. The film spends most of its two-hour runtime focusing on Stu's life before he donned the robe, and it's not a life worth emulating. He was a crass, hard-headed man who never took no for an answer, and who resorted to very creepy tactics to get what he wanted - such as when he fell for Carmen, he literally stalked her to the church and kept hassling her until she fell for him, including a fake desire to be Catholic himself so he can get close to her.

Maybe this was told to show the complete turnaround he takes after his near-death accident, but even after pursuing the priesthood he continued his hardheaded ways, and the film really glosses over important aspects of his story and even makes them more contrived than they probably (or hopefully) were. Carmen becomes an afterthought when Stu pursues the ministry, and he doesn't really seem to offer any contrition for how he treated her and essentially ditched her to pursue his next big passion project. There's also a strange moment between him and a fellow seminary student who never really liked him, and how that student confessed to him that he didn't want to be in the seminary, which felt more like a pat on Stu's back rather than Stu really offering anything substantial. To me, Stu never seemed like a wholly decent fella from the start, and even though he endured all these trials, he seemed about as enjoyable at the end as he was at the beginning.

Mark Wahlberg financed the film himself after failing to find a studio to take it on, which was a huge risk to him because most religious films are seen by the devout, who refuse to see an R-rated movie (except for "The Passion of the Christ"), so a tale about a man's redemption to the cross not named Jesus being R-rated was a big hurdle to cross. While the film was based by critics, it was praised by audiences, which goes to show that even the pious will suck it up to see a faith-based film. Wahlberg gives his natural charm all it's got, but still portrays Stu as a bit of a creeper at the start and doesn't really redeem him much by the end, but he does manage to soften up the edges. Jacki Weaver has little to do other than be the doting worrying mother, although she does offer the most hilarious line in the film (when Stu says he wants to be a priest, and she asks, "for Halloween?"), and as mentioned before, Teresa Ruiz's Carmen is abandoned as a simple plot point.

The only other character worth noting is Mel Gibson's Bill, the hard-drinking, hard-living father of Stu (even though the real-life Bill was nothing like that), and Gibson's performance was a bit over-the-top in my opinion. He overacted and become very melodramatic, which probably isn't a surprise because the film was written and directed by his girlfriend Rosalind Ross, so of course his role became more pronounced than it should've been.

Even though the film highlights the importance of a second chance, it doesn't really deliver on that message in the way it should've. We don't see Stu's impact on the world until the final moments of the film, after spending the majority of it wondering how a man like him could've made a difference in anyone's life. By focusing its attention on the before, it neglected the after, resulting in another subpar biopic adventure for the former Marky Mark.

The Score: B-