Father Stu

In Octo­ber 2017, Mark Wahlberg told the Chicagoan car­di­nal Blasé Cupich that he hoped God would for­give him for mak­ing ​“poor choic­es” like Boo­gie Nights, the sin­gle great­est non-ham­burg­er enter­prise with which he’s ever been involved. Eleven months lat­er, he took to Insta­gram and post­ed a run­down of his baf­fling dai­ly rou­tine, which begins at 2:30 in the morn­ing and allots thir­ty min­utes of ​‘prayer time’ to be wrapped up by 3:15.

Aside from illus­trat­ing that the image of a sand-and-grav­el Mass­a­chu­setts town­ie belies a deeply strange, Hol­ly­wood-brained man, these mis­sives from the mind of the for­mer Funky Bunch affil­i­ate and would-be 9/11-stop­per place his per­son­al nar­ra­tive on the path to self-improve­ment. He’s sinned – though his trans­gres­sions are clos­er to the PCP-fuelled-hate-crime vari­ety than he cares to men­tion – and he’s ready to be redeemed by the cleans­ing love of the Lord.

Wahlberg found a kin­dred soul in the late Stu­art Long, whose event­ful life sto­ry the actor heard while out at a din­ner with two priests. What sounds like the set-up to a joke now has its punch­line in the form of Father Stu, a com­pe­tent yet uncon­vinc­ing biopic that sup­plies its producer/​star with an avatar putting his own arc of weird sal­va­tion back in the blue-col­lar alpha terms he prefers onscreen.

A lot of stuff hap­pened to Stu, and the com­pul­sion to cov­er it all leaves the plot plod­ding and mis­shapen, informed more by the struc­ture of an e‑mail for­ward than a screen­play. The unac­count­ably long first act takes us through sev­er­al piv­ots, as Stu ditch­es his small-time wrestling gig, moves to Los Ange­les to pur­sue movie star­dom, finds stop­gap employ­ment behind a butch­er counter, and con­verts to Roman Catholi­cism so he can bang the tra­di­tion-ori­ent­ed Mex­i­can beau­ty (Tere­sa Ruiz) he’s resolved to win over on first sight.

That’s a whole lot of pro­logue just to estab­lish point A for this hard-livin’ guy as salty lan­guage, DUI charges, and estrange­ment from his father (Mel Gib­son, also work­ing the bas­tard-makes-good angle to decid­ed­ly less cred­i­ble results). He only starts mov­ing toward point B after a brush with death in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent, at which point he decides he’s pinned down his pur­pose at last and joins the sem­i­nary. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for him, he soon learns that a rapid degen­er­a­tive mus­cle con­di­tion will cut his life short, and unfor­tu­nate­ly for us, this ill­ness man­i­fests in a gouty-necked 30-pound weight gain that smoth­ers Wahlberg’s per­for­mance of coarse likability.

While writer-direc­tor Ros­alind ​“Mrs. Mel Gib­son” Ross avoids the cul­ture-war dog-whistling (and overt siren-blar­ing) of the Pure­flix abom­i­na­tions that have over­tak­en the faith-based film genre, she still shares their ten­den­cy for inspi­ra­tional pap. The R rat­ing assures that this will be a more ground­ed depic­tion of Chris­t­ian devo­tion than most, and at times, Wahlberg even sells the con­vic­tion of some­one sur­ren­der­ing to a force high­er than them­selves. But these earnest emo­tions draw out the phoni­ness from the hok­i­er moments Ross can’t resist; as sure as Jesus ris­ing after three days, the film must give its take on the old ​‘foot­prints in the sand’ bit.

While Stu’s jour­ney from head­strong to hum­bled demon­strates that there’s no sin­gle cor­rect way to wor­ship, he’s real­ly trad­ing one cliché (the way­ward non-believ­er) for anoth­er (cool youth pas­tor). Dur­ing the scene in which his no-bull­shit ser­mon­is­ing gets through to a group of hard­ened prison inmates, it’s plain to see that an uncouth man­ner embrac­ing imper­fec­tion res­onates with reg’lar folks more than per­fect­ly squeaky-clean god­li­ness. And yet the unfo­cused script from out­classed first-timer Ross nev­er real­ly fol­lows through on what should be its foun­da­tion­al idea, led astray by under­done sub­plots and vague rela­tion­ships between its characters.

All that’s real in here, from the facts of its subject’s biog­ra­phy to Wahlberg’s con­nec­tion with it, does lit­tle to make any of it feel true. Just as a prayer turns into mere words with­out dis­ci­pline behind it, Stu’s long and wind­ing road to heav­en becomes a list of plot points in its shape­less indi­rec­tion. Though he even­tu­al­ly found his way, the route there is too cir­cuitous, too well-trod, and too need­less­ly lengthy to be worth following.