Mark Reviews Movies: FATHER STU

Father Stu, Columbia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 12, 2022

The story of Father Stu is all about change—not just external change, but real and believable internal evolution. The protagonist here, an amateur boxer with no real aims or goals in life when his athletic prospects disappear, is a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort of guy and a smooth talker, to boot.

When he announces that he has found religion, after being raised in a home that actively dismissed it and having no purpose for it in his own life, there's plenty of reason to doubt him. When he proclaims that he wants to become a Catholic priest, the initial instinct of everyone in this story—even those who accept his newfound faith as being genuine—is to look for the angle in the guy's plan.

Director Rosalind Ross' screenplay is based on a true story. That gives it a bit of leeway in terms of just how much we have to, not only accept, but genuinely believe about Stuart Long (Mark Wahlberg), the pugilist who goes off to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming famous, only to find faith along a long, winding, and difficult path that probably would leave a lot of people utterly defeated.

In a certain way, it all lines up, as Ross explores the reasons for Stu's doubts about life, the world, and his own worth. He could give up at any point here, and ultimately, he does from a certain perspective. He gives up all of the stuff that has made him feel that way, without forgetting it, and in that way of genuine faith, Stu hands it all over to a higher power. In that specifically Catholic way, he does—and doesn't do—deeds to prove that conviction.

Ross' movie, then, is fundamentally about faith and religious practice, but it succeeds, to a certain extent, where so many faith-based movies collapse—under the weight of trying to change minds and hearts or with the fault of ignoring the needs of storytelling in order to preach to the proverbial choir. The only heart and mind that really matter here belong to Stu (with those belonging to his family and friends being a secondary but still important priority. In terms of telling this story, Ross does with an attentive eye toward how, when, and why her main character undergoes those changes.

It's a shame, then, that the potential of this material is let down by its central performance. Well, it's undermined by half of that performance, to be more specific.

To be fair, Wahlberg is quite good as the pre-conversion Stu, a man who just sort of glides with the winds of whatever life brings to him, because to stop and think for a second might bring too much pain. He's the son of Bill (Mel Gibson), an alcoholic who abandoned the family, and Kathleen (Jacki Weaver), who's so protective of her son that most of her words and much of her attitude seem judgmental. Stu is also the brother of a dead boy, which explains a lot about his parents' demolished marriage and his own drive to do something important—even if he has no clue what that might be—with his life.

Due to health concerns, Stu has to quit boxing and, on an impulse, decides to move out to California, where his estranged father lives and works, to become an actor. While working at a grocery store to pay the bills, he spots and falls for Carmen (Teresa Ruiz), and after learning that she is active in a local Catholic church, Stu ends up a regular, trying to woo her, and even gets baptized, just so Carmen will consider going on a date with him.

Stu's genuine conversion arrives soon enough, with a multi-car wakeup call about his self-destructive behavior, and it's at this point, when the story really requires us to be certain of Stu's change for all of the emotional and thematic weight that accompany it, that Wahlberg's performance falters. He adapts a generally softer attitude, but it comes across as an air of gentleness and humility, without the sincere change of thinking and outlook that must be within Stu for this material to really work.

That undermines a lot of what follows in this story, with Stu realizing he wants to become a priest (even after Carmen consummates their romance), asserting his case to the monsignor (played by Malcolm McDowell) of the seminary, and battling his instincts to become a compassionate, selfless man of the cloth. One of the things to appreciate about Ross' depiction of the protagonist is that Stu's faith doesn't become the be-all and end-all of his internal struggles. He still possesses doubts (That relationship with his father isn't going to resolve itself through faith alone), anger (He imagines pummeling a particularly critical fellow seminarian), and uncertainty about his place in the world. Those only become a bigger battle when Stu receives a medical diagnosis that changes his perspective on what his life will be.

It's not entirely Wahlberg's fault that the later developments of Father Stu don't make as much of an impact as the movie clearly intends (Ross does skip a step or two in the character's growth). The movie, though, does depend on our belief in the kind of person Stu becomes, and the actor simply doesn't make us believe.

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