Father Stu Review: A Right-Wing Dog Whistle Disguised As a Tribute to Catholic Faith

In writer-director Rosalind Ross’s faith-based biopic Father Stu, Mark Wahlberg plays Stuart Ross, an amateur boxer who’s stuck fighting in a local Montana circuit and struggling to find a sponsor as he’s aging out of the profession. The film gives the actor yet another opportunity to draw on his wise-cracking tough-guy persona, though Stuart’s parade of personal challenges also forces Wahlberg to reveal a bit more vulnerability than his previous work, which unfortunately proves not to be one of his natural strengths.

From having to hang up his gloves due to post-fight infections that could prove fatal to living with the trauma of losing his younger brother in childhood to a sudden illness, Stuart has grown used to handling life’s difficulties. And, indeed, Father Stu presents the man as a fighter in every sense of the word, whether it’s in the ring or out in Los Angeles, where he heads to chase his newfound dream of becoming an actor and, later, an ordained priest.

Stuart is a fount of bombastic unearned confidence, but the film doesn’t care to interrogate his hard-nosed attitude or the effect it has on others. In fact, his toughness, aggression, and resilience are all presented as uniformly charming and celebrated as masculine ideals. Even Stuart’s romantic pursuit of a Mexican woman, Carmen (Teresa Ruiz) has an extremely testosterone-fueled quality to it that grows more unsettling as it proceeds. Not only does he essentially stalk the young woman, following her to the Catholic Church she attends, but he soon decides to get baptized just so he’ll finally be able to take her out.

That this whole bizarre courting process is meant to be taken at face value as cute and romantic, with Carmen’s repeated rejections being dismissed by Stuart, is all part and parcel of Father Stu’s thinly veiled arch-conservative worldview. After all, this is a film that sees Hollywood as full of “fascist hippies,” and immoral casting agents, one of whom propositions Stuart for a blowjob, only to be thrown up against the wall and threatened for daring to challenge the former pugilist’s unquestionable heterosexuality.

At another point in Father Stu, our protagonist stares at a trans woman leaving his hotel—a moment seemingly included, and shot in slow-motion, only to underscore the immorality that the film sees as running rampant in the City of Angels. Even after becoming a priest, Stuart comments to his father (Mel Gibson), an embittered, alcoholic mess now living in a trailer park, that everyone living there should wake up and find a job.

Which is to say that Father Stu’s right-wing dog whistle never stops blowing. But the film’s failures also extend to how flimsily it conveys Stuart’s drastic spiritual transformation. It’s only after a near-fatal motorcycle accident that Stuart decides to seriously dedicate his life to God. Prior to that he has a mysterious run-in with a Jesus lookalike who tells him to turn his life around, and after the mishap he has a vision of the Virgin Mary. But aside from these scenes, the film gives little sense of what actually changed within Stuart to so suddenly cause him to not only embrace religion but intensely desire to become a man of the cloth.

This all stems from Father Stu’s frustrating lack of curiosity about the interiority of its characters as well as its overreliance on Stuart’s suffering to achieve most of its pathos. At different points, Stuart says that his suffering is “a gift from God” and that “the Church needs someone who will fight for God,” drawing direct comparisons to his former career as a boxer. It’s all very much in line with the film’s unwavering vision of Christianity not as a means to achieve spiritual enlightenment or redemption, but as a punitive, Old Testament force that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.