“Good Joe Bell” is a political statement very confused with itself. In fact, it’s as confused as its wide-eyed titular protagonist (played by a miscast Mark Wahlberg), a short-tempered man who doesn’t seem to understand the plight his openly-gay and bullied son went through in high school.
Based on a true story that received national media attention in 2013, the whole film feels like it would have been better served as a 60-second news segment rather than a two-hour movie. The result is all the more disappointing due to it reuniting the screenwriting duo of Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, 15 years after writing their groundbreaking screenplay for Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.”
“Good Joe Bell” tackles an important subject matter, but I don’t believe the real-life Joe Bell was as ignorant and dubiously detached from reality as Mark Wahlberg is on-screen here. “I mean, everybody’s against bullying, aren’t they?” Bell tells his wife (Connie Britton) before embarking on a redemptive cross-country campaign for “change.” But what “change” exactly? What is Bell’s purpose in walking from his hometown in Oregon all the way to New York City? I get it, his teenage son Jadin (Reid Miller) dreamed of living in the Big Apple, and Bell is trying to find his own purpose in life by giving speeches in high school auditoriums about bullying and accepting one another, all well-intentioned, of course.
Jadin is there with pops, every step of the way in his redemptive journey, cheering him. Until he is not. I guess this is where a big huge SPOILER should be written in caps locks because, well, Jadin is dead. In 2013, Bell’s son killed himself on an elementary school playground after the bullying became too much to bear. Green waits until halfway through the movie to reveal this important piece of information and, might I add, in a rather clunky manner.
Using flashbacks to show Joe Bell’s transformative journey during the present-time, Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who showed promise with his flawed but ambitious indie “Monsters and Men”) shows us Bell as this pretty awkward but well-meaning father who feels uncomfortable that his openly gay son has joined the all-girl cheer squad. His hesitation turns to anger when he learns that Jadin is bullied by the Football team jocks in the locker room and being harassed online by them with horrible messages like “just do us all a favor. OFF URSELF” on his profile.
Green’s movie doesn’t even tackle how terrible of an act suicide actually is, it’s rather portrayed here as an act of sacrifice because, well, you know, Joe Bell wouldn’t have found his true calling without his son killing himself, ditto the high school bullies who are now completely reformed and feel terrible, just terrible, about the abuse they spewed against Jadin. Someone should have alerted Osana, McMurtry, and Green to the “It gets better” campaign, where formerly bullied LGBT “survivors” preach a mantra that suicide is not the answer.“
Good Joe Bell” feels heavy-handed, pedantic, and dictating — an emotionally manipulative treatise on homophobia and bullying without an ounce of self-awareness about its flawed approach towards those topics. It preaches without understanding what it preaches. [D]