A star vehicle for producer-star Mark Wahlberg, whose involvement complicates a movie that ironically would not exist without his participation, "Joe Bell" is based on the true story of a man who walked from La Grande, Oregon, to New York City in 2015 to raise awareness of bullying.
Bell was driven to this extraordinary demonstration by the loss of his son Jadin, an openly gay 15-year old who killed himself after months of being tormented by bigots at his high school. The dramatized movie version of this story is poised between no-budget indie-film intimacy and Hollywood bombast. The emphasis on the father's grief often crowds out the suffering of Jadin, his mother, and other major characters. And as the movie, like its hero, trudges dutifully towards its climax, there's no shortage of unnecessary trickery in the telling (including the re-use of a storytelling device that was all over the place in the late 1990s and early aughts; you'll know it when you see it). "Joe Bell" is carried by its good heart, generally strong performances, and superb direction by Renaldo Marcus Green ("Monsters and Men"), and there are a number of moments when you can see a much stronger, more focused film struggling to escape from the morass that's in front of you.
It's frustrating to watch a movie that seems so unable to get out of its own way—all the more so because this is one of the last collaborations between the Oscar-winning screenwriting team of Diane Ossining and Larry McMurtry. Their classic drama "Brokeback Mountain," likewise about sexual repression and persecution in the American heartland, now feels like a past-tense companion piece to "Joe Bell." That attitudes don't seemed to have changed much since Jack and Ennis had to hide their love away is a tragedy of another sort, and it's touched upon in a scene at a gay bar where Joe has an awkward conversation with a drag performer—a middle-aged gay man tells our hero that the social advances of the 21st century never left major cities.
Another source of frustration is Mark Wahlberg's flat, at times listless performance, which would negatively impact the film even if the actor didn't enter it carrying baggage similar to that of the bullies that drove Jadin to his death. As a Boston teenager in the '80s, Wahlberg committed an array of hate crimes, and although he has made gestures in the direction of atoning for them—including apologizing to one of his victims and receiving forgiveness, and petitioning the governor of Massachusetts to have his records expunged—skeptics said it was too little, too late, and speculated that it was impelled by the Wahlberg family's financial self-interest as owners of a chain of burger restaurants. "Joe Bell" does not appear to have been a direct response to a suggestion by the aforementioned forgiver that Wahlberg do a film warning against the evils of bigotry, although in that case, the suggestion was that Wahlberg's character be a racist rather than a homophobe (not that there's never any crossover).
Wahlberg seems to be going for something in the vein of Heath Ledger in "Brokeback," Bradley Cooper in "American Sniper," or Clint Eastwood in anything. He stares into the middle distance with narrowed eyes, pushes a wagon filled with minimal provisions along dusty farm roads throughout the flat northern states, and sometimes bursts into tears of sorrow at Jadin's memory. But he's badly outclassed by all of his costars, particularly Connie Britton as Joe's wife, Lola; Reid Miller as Jadin; Maxwell Jenkins as Joe, Jr., who would rather have his dad at home than out on the highway making a spectacle of himself; and Gary Sinise, who comes in at the end in small but important role and is so smashingly effective at communicating the pain of a reactionary man stumbling towards decency.
Sinise is too old to play the real Joe (who was 45 when he lost his son), but he has a gift for universalizing politically coded "heartland" characters that might otherwise seem as if they're pandering. Wahlberg often seems like he's pandering these days, and he does come across as pandering here, however sincere his intentions with this particular project. Since the mid-aughts, he's played so many soft-spoken, simple-but-strong men, often clad in either military uniforms or jean jackets and ball caps, that he's turning into a human Budweiser commercial. The filmmakers seem to want "Joe Bell" to reach the kinds of guys who'd happily pay to watch Wahlberg punch or shoot people for apple pie, fireworks, and Uncle Sam, but would never ordinarily consider sitting still for a poker-faced melodrama about a man who feels such deep remorse over his failure to stand up for his son when he was still around that he's turned himself into a mobile Christ figure, pushing his sins in a wheelbarrow and telling everyone he meets that they need to be nicer to people.
Ossining and McMurtry are well-aware of the traps built into this kind of project, and have been sure to include a few lines that raise an eyebrow at Joe's mission. Joe is clearly not a great communicator: he talks at people rather than to them, and avoids specifics that might explain why he's there, and the reaction shots of people in his audiences make people seem like they're listening out of respect for a man who has suffered, not because they really want to understand why he's suffering. And early in the story, after Joe places a tolerance pamphlet on the table of a couple of homophobic bullies at a truck stop rather than confront them, his son points out the central irony of Joe's situation: guys like the ones in the diner are much more in need of hearing his message than the the people who actually turn out to listen to it, and that there's no easy way to reach them, much less get them to open their ears and minds.
Such is the conundrum of all social message movies, stretching through "Gentleman's Agreement" (anti-Semitism), "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (racism), "Philadelphia" (homophobia) and beyond. It's naïve to think that "Joe Bell" can escape it, although the movie's straightforward characterizations, loving visual attention to small-town and rural landscapes, and mix of liberal and conservative signifiers often has a Clint Eastwood-like hypnotic effect, drawing you into the fiction and forcing the admission that most people are confounding and contradict themselves. It's easy to imagine characters from Eastwood's heartland melodramas mingling with the Bell family.
Wahlberg's star profile makes the film seem a bit more Joe-focused than it really us; the final stretch of the film shifts attention to Joe, Jr. and Connie, and appears to side with them in suggesting that what Joe is doing is more self-aggrandizing than helpful, but understandable given the strength of the conditioning that he's trying to break through. A placard at the end of the credits marks the production as property of an LLC called The Bells of LaGrande, which would have been a better title than "Joe Bell," and more honestly reflective of the community nature of the loss depicted here.
The director, a young African-American man born and raised on the east coast, treats the film's mostly working-class, white, middle-aged, probably-voted-for-Trump characters with unforced sympathy, framing it within a redemptive Christian framework of people struggling towards grace with knowledge that it may never be achieved. The widescreen images and unabashedly sentimental music (by Jacques Jouffrat and Antonio Pinto, respectively) are reminiscent, perhaps deliberately so, of Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter," still the gold standard for films about agonized working-class American prisoners of machismo. Sublime moments here and there allow the to landscape dwarf the characters, the sheer beauty of the mountains, prairies, and rain-swept towns seeming to comment on the pettiness of hatred in any culture. When a world is this beautiful, the film seems to be saying, why would anyone act ugly?
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