I watched Blood Father—a tough, smart, violent little movie available on demand—on my iPad this past weekend. It works as a companion piece to Hell or High Water, the riveting bank-robber flick that many people think is the movie of the year so far, only instead of being set in hardscrabble Texas, this one is set in white-trash California. It’s about a sixtyish ex-con tattoo artist who’s managed to stay on the straight and narrow until his estranged teenage daughter shows up. She’s run afoul of a drug cartel and needs his help to stay alive.
I’d recommend it unreservedly for those who like this kind of Breaking Bad fare but for one thing: Its star is Mel Gibson. People who’ve been watching movies for the past 30 years will not be surprised that Gibson is the best thing in the movie, since he’s usually the best thing in every movie he’s ever been in. What’s more, when he’s behind the camera, his direction is the best thing in the movies he makes. Gibson is a remarkably talented man. But people who’ve been following the news for the past decade also know he’s a genuinely disgusting human being—a basket of deplorables in and of himself, and likely irredeemably so.
He’s been exposed as an abuser of women. Gibson once told his ex-girlfriend, who claimed he broke her jaw while she was holding their infant daughter, that she deserved “a bat in the side of [her] head.” She also caught him on tape saying “you look like a f—ing b—h in heat and if you get raped by a pack of n—ers, it will be your fault.” And of course, he’s one of the most openly rancid antisemites in America. When stopped by a police officer in 2006 for drunk driving, he started muttering about “f—ing Jews” and saying “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” He once referred to Jews as “oven dodgers” after Winona Ryder (a Jew) objected to an antigay joke he made in her presence. Just this month he told Glenn Beck that “some Jewish people—I guess some rabbis or something” had stolen a copy of his movie The Passion of the Christ before it was released, and blackened his name.
Gibson did, indeed, find himself awash in controversy over the film’s questionable portrayal of the Jewish role in the crucifixion—it was the subject of complaint from the Anti-Defamation League—but the movie was a colossal hit and Gibson made $350 million from it, the largest haul anyone in history has ever taken away from a single motion picture. It wasn’t until the story about Gibson ranting about Jews to the Malibu police officer two years later that he truly reaped the antisemite’s whirlwind. The fact that Gibson continues to blame his own ruined reputation on Jewish thievery rather than his own loathsome conduct is a mark of what an awful person he is.
So, what to do? Does one see Mel Gibson movies or avoid them? It’s a classic dilemma, made all the more complicated by the fact that, if you buy a ticket or download a film, some fraction of the proceeds will end up flowing to Gibson. That will be true as well in November when his first directorial effort in 10 years, Hacksaw Ridge, is released—the true story of a World War II medic who was also a conscientious objector and won a Medal of Honor. It’s a great story, and he’s really quite a brilliant director, Gibson is, as his work on the Oscar-winning Braveheart demonstrated—and even more so on his breathtaking Apocalypto, made after The Passion of the Christ, a pre-Columbian chase story about a man trying to evade a band of cannibals hunting him down. But can you bear to give him your custom for a film of pacific uplift in the midst of war?
If you cannot bear to look at Gibson’s face, or consider Gibson’s work because of what he’s said and done, your refusal to do so is unimpeachable. It’s an emotional as well as intellectual response to the unforgivable and is both valid and worthy. But what of those of us who know full well that he’s despicable and yet (as the fact that I saw Blood Father attests) can still bring ourselves to watch him or see the films he directs?
The easiest case to make is that morally questionable people have created art from the dawn of time. Caravaggio was likely a murderer. Stendhal was a plagiarist. Can’t we still see the beauty in a Caravaggio even if we know of the bestiality of Caravaggio? Can’t we lose ourselves in Stendhal’s endless layers of irony even though we know he was a word thief?
The answer to these questions is obviously yes, but they don’t quite address this situation. What these bad men produced was art that transcended them. Gibson is not Caravaggio, nor is he Stendhal. He is a glamorous and exciting film actor and a terrific director, but nothing he’s done or made is a necessary work that has changed aesthetic history or contributed to the advance of Western civilization. So I’m not sure we get a pass using this argument.
I think the best case—or my only case—is that I don’t really care what Mel Gibson thinks or what he does. His noxious views and behavior are notably private. (I don’t accept the contention that The Passion of the Christ is prima facie antisemitic, though of course one is obliged to consider that an antisemite cowrote and directed it.) Moreover, if I really did allow my moral disapproval of the views of actors and directors to guide my moviegoing selections, I’d also have to boycott the films of Mark Ruffalo and Marion Cotillard, both of whom are 9/11 truthers. And I loved both You Can Count on Me (Ruffalo) and The Dark Knight Rises (Cotillard). And so many others.
What’s more, Gibson has paid a huge price. He is no longer on the Hollywood A-list, and that’s entirely due to the fact that Hollywood can’t be sure he won’t open his mouth on a publicity tour for a new movie and, with a stray word, destroy the financial future of a $150 million project. If he hadn’t been such a grievous jerk, he could have had a career to rival Tom Hanks’s. But he is, and he doesn’t. So now he does movies like Blood Father. He doesn’t need to: He’s worth an estimated $425 million. But he’s an actor and he wants to act. So he does.
More important, since he’s an actor, he wants to be loved. And his greatest punishment is that he never will be loved again. No download I make of a Gibson movie, no ticket I buy to a Gibson movie, is going to change that, and in its own way, that’s a pretty severe and deserved punishment.
