93 min | R | July 23, 2021 | Roadside Attractions
A father walks across America to lecture strangers about bullying after his gay son suffers for being himself. The walk is real. The movie is a guilt trip with a backpack.
Joe Bell is an Oregon father who sets out to walk across the country giving speeches against bullying. He is doing this because of what happened to his son Jadin, a gay teenager who was tormented at school. The film cuts between the lonely road and the home life that produced both the boy and the man who failed to protect him. Reinaldo Marcus Green frames this as a redemption story. The harder, truer film buried inside it is about a father who only learns to listen to his son when it is too late.
Mark Wahlberg plays Joe as a clenched, inarticulate man who mistakes presence for support. The performance never finds the interior life that would make Joe more than a type. Reid Miller plays Jadin and walks away with the picture. He gives the boy a specific blend of defiance and exhaustion, performing Lady Gaga routines in the living room while bracing for the next humiliation at school. Connie Britton plays Lola Bell with a weary clarity that the script keeps at the margins, and Gary Sinise turns a brief role as Sheriff Westin into the film’s only adult who actually hears what Joe is saying.
Green directs from a script by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, the team behind Brokeback Mountain. The screenplay leans on a structural device that withholds a key fact to manufacture a midpoint revelation, and the gimmick cheapens the grief it is supposed to deepen. The road footage is shot flat and gray, all asphalt and overcast Oregon, which suits the mood but gives the eye nothing to hold. The flashbacks to Jadin’s life carry more color and energy than anything on the highway. The editing keeps returning to the walk long after the walk has stopped revealing anything new.
This is a sincere film about an important subject that does not trust its audience to feel without being instructed. The message is right and the delivery is a lecture. Miller’s Jadin is alive and particular, and every scene built around him suggests the movie this could have been. Instead the film hands the story to the father and asks us to credit his sorrow as growth. Joe Bell wants to be a tribute. It plays like an apology that arrives at the wrong address.