Joe Bell (2021 | USA | 91 minutes | Reinaldo Marcus Green)
It is hard to shake the feeling that Joe Bell was designed with an Oscar nomination for acting in mind, though along the way it ended up forgetting to make an engaging film to justify such an award.
It stars Mark Wahlberg as Joe Bell, a father who decides to walk across the country to honor his son, Jadin. Jadin, played by a woefully underutilized Reid Miller, is gay and was never supported by his father who failed to stand by him when he needed him most. Now, after a tragedy, Joe has decided the best way to find redemption is to spread a message of anti-bullying by walking across the United States to give talks about his own experience.
Wahlberg’s own history makes him an odd fit for the role. He has previously made comments about being “creeped out” when considered for a role in Brokeback Mountain and has several documented hate crimes in his past. While it is certainly possible for someone to make amends, the choice to cast Wahlberg as the lead leaves the film in a bind about how to contend with his past. Perhaps there was some thought that it was precisely because of his past that Wahlberg would fit the role. After all, Joe is a deeply flawed person and also has much to make amends for. However, Wahlberg feels far out of his depth and plays the role with one note, conveying the uncomfortable sense that the film doubles as damage control for a prominent actor whose image is in need of repair.
If true redemption was earned, both for the actor and the person he is playing, that would be a separate conversation. Instead, the entire film’s portrait of the long road to healing is shallow and superficial. It, perhaps unintentionally, reveals how Joe ended up taking an easy path by running from many of his problems. Instead of grappling with those problems and trying to take responsibility, he takes a literal walk across the country without doing much reflecting on how he failed as a father. Both actor and character mostly get to take a moral high road to give advice on how others can be more caring. It overlooks and flattens much of the hypocrisy of the character, making for a film that seems uninterested in instilling the story with any nuance.
There are moments where writers Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, who interestingly wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, make attempts to show how Joe still has much work to do. He frequently lashes out at his family for the smallest of reasons. He is constantly on the edge of an outburst of rage that always feels dangerously close to physical abuse. It is more than okay to have such a character be a central focus of a film. Such a portrayal can exist without letting a person off the hook by actually getting into the messy aspects of their life. Unfortunately, Joe Bell is a stagnant character, never seeming to do much growing or changing as he goes about preaching a message of compassion he himself doesn’t live. Such staggering hypocrisy could have been be handled deftly, though this film doesn’t even come close to engaging with it. By simultaneously sanitizing certain aspects of its story while exploiting others, it feels as oblivious to its own meaning as 2018’s Green Book.
The overarching problem is that the journey Joe goes on is not really about his son. This is all about his own ego and lack of ability to look inward. That becomes abundantly clear when we slowly realize how his son Jadin exists at the margins of this story, a punching bag for the torments of the world. Miller brings a lot of depth and humanity to the role, though the lack of a complete portrayal of his character stymies any development he gets to have. While perhaps well intentioned, the result sidelines much of who he is as a person. When Jadin almost entirely fades into the background, Wahlberg is left to carry the story all by himself. It becomes clear that he is out of his depth and not in a way that serves the character. The film just follows a formula that proves to be a disservice to all the real lives being represented here. It is all the worse that, in a story about people who deserved so much better than the hands they were dealt, the film treats them as poorly as the world did.
Joe Bell is in theaters starting July 22.