Father Stu (2022)

Father Stu arrives as a curiosity: a faith-based biopic with an R rating, a foul-mouthed leading man, and a first-time director in Rosalind Ross. It follows Stuart Long, an amateur boxer from Montana who drifts to Los Angeles chasing acting work, meets a Sunday school teacher named Carmen, and eventually trades the bottle and the audition circuit for the seminary. Mark Wahlberg gained thirty pounds for the part. Mel Gibson plays the alcoholic father. The project was financed in part by Wahlberg's own money, which is either devotion or a tax strategy, and nobody involved is saying which.

The film's social consciousness is modest and largely incidental. Carmen is Latina, played by Teresa Ruiz, and her family appears without any comment on the matter. A woman directed it, and Jacki Weaver gets a few moments of steel as Stu's mother, but the camera stays fixed on the suffering of one white man. There is no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no critique of the economic order. Stu's material ambitions are personal and are abandoned, not indicted.

The illness that defines the back half, inclusion body myositis, is rendered as spiritual trial instead of bodily politics. His weight gain and his decay are framed as gifts that draw him closer to Christ, which places the film at some distance from any contemporary conversation about bodies. The moralizing here is religious, not progressive, and it is delivered with the plain confidence of a man who has already decided the argument. What we get is sincere, occasionally effective, and almost entirely out of step with the present moment. It ends with photographs of the real priest. The audience, apparently, wept.