Mark Reviews Movies: JOE BELL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 22, 2021

The multiple problems with Joe Bell boil down to one thing: It's a movie that doesn't know and doesn't particularly seem to care about whose story it's meant to be telling. This story is based on a true one—a sad and tragic one on many levels. That isn't a reason to give it additional leeway. Indeed, director Reinaldo Marcus Green's movie and its repeatedly wrongheaded choices occasionally feel downright distasteful, because they're playing a game with real issues, real people, and real pain.

Where does one begin with the errors in judgment and focus on the part of Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry's screenplay? That's a legitimately difficult question to answer, not only because the script possesses several miscalculations and bad ideas, but also because the screenplay is structured in a way that vital information is delayed and hidden for a stretch of time. There's little reason to worry about "spoiling" a movie based on a true story, but Ossana and McMurtry certainly put that theory to the test here—for misguided reasons that should become apparent once we arrive at the movie's big "twist."

It all begins as what seems to be a fun, lighthearted road-trip story. The eponymous protagonist, played by Mark Wahlberg, is walking, talking, and laughing through Idaho with his son Jadin (Reid Miller).

We learn a few things. Joe started his walk from his small town in Oregon. He's planning to travel by foot all the way to New York City. He's stopping along the way at various schools and other places to give talks about the damage that can be done by bullying. Joe is doing this because Jadin is gay and has been regularly bullied by classmates.

Those who know the real story behind Bell's cross-country mission will, undoubtedly, find this setup strange. Even those who might be encountering this story for the first time will likely find the premise, the characters' motives, and the tone of the early section of the story a bit odd. None of it seems to fit, on account of the ambition and apparent severity of Joe's mission, compared to the jovial nature of the father-son relationship and Jadin's generally good spirits.

Joe and Jadin keep marching, chatting, and joking. Joe makes a speech at a local high school, about how his son has been bullied for being seen as different and how bad that is (All of his talks amount to those basics). Jadin insists that his father needs to bring his message to those who might not otherwise hear or want to it, and flashbacks gradually show how a distracted and embarrassed Joe didn't fully support Jadin, as the 15-year-old endures increasingly hostile and violent bullying at school and online.

The "twist," of course, is that Jadin is dead. Joe has been imagining his son's presence on the road and, in theory, also imagining a much stronger, far more supportive relationship than the one he had when the boy was alive.

As awkward and manipulative as this initial gimmick is, there's still some potential as soon as the weight of the trickery is lifted. Here, then, is a story of grief—of trying to find answers, even if it means inventing them—and guilt—of realizing one's own shortcomings and failures, even though it's too late to really do anything about them. Wahlberg's performance, quiet and stoic, communicates this well enough, and it's also worthwhile in the way the actor gives us a sense of anger—with his circumstances, with the world, with himself—boiling up to the surface.

The rest of the movie, though, isn't quite about that, because it still has more to reveal about Jadin, as well as the circumstances of his death, and more trickery to attempt—not only in further delaying the truth of what happened to the son, but also in providing Joe a reason to make sense of Jadin's life and death. All of that sense, ultimately, remains with Joe, as he tries to forgive himself for his failures.

The ghost or vision of the dead son, then, is less a real person and more a conduit for that forgiveness. While this is clearly meant to be Joe's story, there's an unavoidable sense of the disingenuous, in the way the filmmakers frame Jadin and his experiences as a lesson, a mission, and a phantom of pain for the father. The teenager doesn't exist in the present-day scenes, and there's little sense of him existing as anything more than the subject of inevitable tragedy during the flashbacks.

Clearly, the filmmakers have good intentions with the tale of Joe Bell. The simplicity and hollow nature of its message, though, isn't worth the cost of exploiting so much genuine agony.

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