Respond to these rapid questions in our Joe Bell quiz and we will tell you which Joe Bell character you are. Play it now.
“Joe Bell” is based on the true story of a man who walked from La Grande, Oregon, to New York City in 2015 in order to raise awareness about bullying. The film is a vehicle for producer-star Mark Wahlberg, whose involvement ironically complicates a film that would not have existed without his participation in the production.
Ultimately, Bell’s motivation was the death of his son Jadin, a 15-year-old openly gay adolescent who committed suicide after months of being bullied by bigots at his high school. The dramatized film version of this story is poised between the intimacy of a low-budget indie film and the grandeur of a Hollywood production. The focus on Jadin’s father’s grief frequently overshadows the suffering of Jadin, his mother, and other major characters in the story (mainly in the first section, its weakest). The film, like its protagonist, trudges through the climax with no shortage of unnecessary trickery (including a non-chronological structure and the re-use of a particular cliche that was all over the place in the late 1990s and early 2000s and should be retired forever; you’ll know it when you see it) and a lack of originality. It is carried by its good heart, generally strong performances, and superb direction by Reinaldo Marcus Green (“Monsters and Men”), and there are moments when you can see a stronger, more focused film struggling to escape the abyss. “Joe Bell” is rated R for language and violence.
It’s discouraging to watch a film that appears incapable of getting out of its own way, which is made all the more frustrating by the fact that this is one of the final collaborations between the Academy Award-winning screenwriting team of Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry. With “Brokeback Mountain,” another of their classic dramas, which is also about sexual repression and persecution in the American heartland, the film now feels like a past-tense companion piece to “Joe Bell.” The fact that attitudes haven’t changed much since Jack and Ennis were forced to keep their relationship hidden is a tragedy of another kind, and it’s brought up in a scene at a gay bar where Joe has an awkward conversation with a drag performer, and a middle-aged gay man sitting across from Joe tells him that the social advances of the twenty-first century haven’t left major cities.
Mark Wahlberg’s monotonous, at times listless performance is another source of dissatisfaction in the film, which would have a negative impact on the film even if the actor didn’t come into the film with baggage similar to that of the bullies who drove Jadin to his death. While still a teenager in Boston in the 1980s, Wahlberg was involved in a number of hate crimes. Although he has made gestures in the direction of atonement—including apologizing to one of his victims and receiving forgiveness, and petitioning Massachusetts’ governor to have his records expunged—skeptics have said that it is too little, too late, and that it is motivated by the Wahlberg family’s financial self-interest as the owners of a chain of burger restaurants. In contrast to the aforementioned forgiver’s suggestion that Wahlberg star in a film warning against bigotry, the film “Joe Bell” does not appear to have been a response to the suggestion that Wahlberg’s character be a racist rather than a homophobe (not that there isn’t crossover between the two).
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Wahlberg appears to be striving for a sort of epic naturalism, with steely eyes flinching at the words of other characters, in the vein of Heath Ledger’s performance in “Brokeback Mountain,” Bradley Cooper’s performance in “American Sniper,” and Clint Eastwood’s performance in, well, anything at this point. He does not possess the necessary range, as they say. Despite the fact that Wahlberg spends the majority of the film staring into the middle distance, pushing a wagon filled with minimal provisions along dusty roads through flat northern states, and occasionally crying, he is vastly outclassed by his co-stars, particularly Connie Britton as Joe’s wife, Lola; Reid Miller as Jadin; Maxwell Jenkins as Joe, Jr., who would rather be at home with his father than out on the highway making a spectacle of himself; and Gary Sinis The real Joe (who was 45 when he lost his son) is too old for Sinise to play, but he has a talent for making politically coded “heartland” characters that otherwise appear to be attempting to flatter their intended audience seem universal.
Wahlberg appears to be pandering more and more these days, and he comes across as pandering here as well, no matter how sincere his intentions may be. As of the mid-aughts, he’s appeared in so many films as hushed, straightforward but strong men, often dressed in either military uniforms or jean jackets and ball caps, that he’s become something of a walking Budweiser commercial. Joe Bell is aimed squarely at the kinds of men who would pay good money to see Mark Wahlberg punch and shoot people in the name of Uncle Sam, apple pie, and fireworks, but who would never sit still for a poker-faced drama about a man who is so consumed by guilt over failing to defend his son while he was still alive that he has transformed himself into a modern Christ figure, pushing his sins around in a wheelbarrow and telling everyone he meets that they need to be nicer.
Joe Bell Quiz
Ossana and McMurtry are well aware of the traps that are built into this type of project, and they have made it a point to include a few lines that cause Joe’s mission to raise an eyebrow. Joe is clearly not a good communicator in this situation. In his speeches, he speaks at people rather than to them, and he avoids providing specifics that might explain why he is there. The reaction shots of his audiences give the impression that they are listening out of respect for a man who has suffered, rather than because they want to understand his suffering. The most rewarding theme in the film is the difficulty in establishing a connection. Another character points out the paradox of Joe’s situation after he places a tolerance pamphlet on the table of a couple of homophobic bullies at a truck stop rather than confronting them: guys like the ones in the diner are in much greater need of hearing his message than the people who show up to listen, and there is no easy way to reach them, much less convince them to open their minds.
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All social message films, from “Gentleman’s Agreement” (anti-Semitism) to “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (racism) to “Philadelphia” (homophobia) and beyond, are characterized by this irony. While it would be naive to believe that “Joe Bell” will be able to escape this, its straightforward characterizations, loving visual attention to rural landscapes, and mix of liberal-conservative signifiers has a Clint Eastwood-like hypnotic effect, drawing you into the fiction and forcing you to admit that most people are confounding and tend to contradict themselves. Several characters from Eastwood’s heartland melodramas could easily be seen congregating with the Bell family.
Because of Wahlberg’s celebrity status, “Joe Bell” appears to be more about Joe than it actually is. The final stretch of the film focuses on Joe Jr. and Connie, and the film appears to agree with them when it suggests that Joe’s masochism is motivated by self-serving interests. They are correct, but his decision is understandable when you consider the strength of the conditioning he is attempting to overcome. After the credits have rolled, a placard identifying the film as the property of an LLC called The Bells of LaGrande is displayed. This would have been a better title than “Joe Bell,” as it would have been more reflective of the community nature of the loss depicted here.
About the quiz
It’s a brilliant film, and the brilliant director, a young Black New Yorker, treats the film’s white, fiftyish, probably-voted-for-Trump characters with genuine empathy, placing them within a redemptive framework of people striving for a state of grace that may or may not be achieved. When you look back on the story, it’s mostly just a chronicle of missed cues and craven errors in judgment that snowball until karma snaps into place and everyone in the Bells’ orbit suffers unimaginable pain, although the closing upbeat/inspirational notes seem a little odd when you look back on the story, which is mostly just astonishingly sad, a chronicle of missed cues and craven errors in judgment that snowball until karma snaps into place and As you can see, the filmmakers chose a non-linear structure because if they showed the same events from beginning to end in chronological order, the audience would be left feeling shaken to their core, and the film would only make $5,000.
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A comparison can be drawn between the film’s widescreen images and sentimental music (by Jacques Jouffret and Antonio Pinto, respectively) and Michael Cimino’s classic film “The Deer Hunter,” which is still considered the gold standard for films about American prisoners of machismo. When the characters are reduced to specks in a vast landscape, sublime moments of cosmic detachment allow the landscape to take over and dominate them. The magnificence of mountains, prairies, and rain-swept towns implicitly condemns the pettiness of hatred in every culture, and this is true throughout the world. It appears that the film is arguing that when the world is this beautiful, why would anyone act in an unattractive manner?
The film is currently showing in theaters.
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