Filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Joe Bell is a fact-based movie, now playing in Los Angeles cinemas as well. The film stars Mark Wahlberg as Joe Bell, a wood mill staffer from Oregon. The film starts in the year 2013 as Bell walks down a highway in Idaho. It is no standard walk but a two-year journey from his native of Oregon to NYC that he undertakes to honor his 15-year-old son Jadin. Here, Bell wears a trekker’s backpack when pushing a cart with food, water, and postcards that announce his so-called ‘Walk for Change’ trek.
Reid Miller’s Jadin soon crosses the roadway to reprimand his father Joe Bell for going too proximate to traffic. Jadin and Joe Bell tell jokes when the latter struggles to even erect a tent that night. Soon, seasoned cinemagoers will realize that it is the ghost of Jadin keeping Bell company as well as that a tragedy has precipitated the latter’s trip.
Then, Bell delivers a brief speech at a high school in Idaho about the perils of bullying. With Bell not even mentioning Jadin during it, it appears a father’s desperate plea rather than a formal speech. Later, Bell tells Jason Cozmo’s character who impersonates Dolly Parton that his gay child Jadin is no more, thereby devasting the impersonator at a drag bar.
Joe Bell is a movie that keeps shifting between the son’s past and the father’s present. So, it takes director Green, as well as, screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, 40 more minutes to disclose the specific details of Jadin’s tragic death. That said, the director and the writers do not fully reveal exactly how Jadin Bell passed away in real life. Maybe they were attempting for a much leaner story, as people like them.
Nevertheless, there is a sense of some missing scenes in many parts of Joe Bell. For instance, we do not see Bell telling his son’s story during his talks at community groups and schools. From the movie, we learn that Joe Bell is as inarticulate a public speaker after his journey as he is in the first Idaho school appearance. Conversely, the real Bell was persuasive in speaking at all times.
When Bell continues to walk, flashbacks show Jadin’s struggle to endure community ridicule at the former’s presence in the squad of football cheerleaders. At the same time, flashbacks show school jocks torturing Jadin unrelentingly through social media and in school. All of the above might seem like a stretch from the umpteenth film about a tortured gay child but for Reid Miller’s performance. Miller does not express the profundity of Jadin Bell’s pain simply, but he suggests the element of charm and kindness that made the real person beloved. Reid Miller’s performance is stunning.
Phone calls between Wahlberg’s Bell and his spouse (Connie Britton) are among the best moments in the film. The marital relationship between Lola and Joe Bell has not been great before their son’s demise but sinks below the sheer weight of grief in the Wahlberg character. Connie Britton does not have much dialogue, but she still implies years of marital miscommunication through how she uses a cigarette and her lips here. The movie also has Gary Sinise as a sheriff who befriends Joe Bell when the latter nears the final moments of his journey on a highway in Colorado.
The whole cast is fortunate to have quality screenwriting for them except for Wahlberg. A co-producer for the film, Wahlberg does not have a character here that is not associated with the redneck cliché. Wahlberg’s based-on-real-life Joe Bell does not have enough time to even hear his gay child come out, as he is eager to watch football. Joe Bell also leaves the stadium as others heckle Jadin with bottles and taunts. Further, Joe Bell suddenly becomes angry as his surviving son, Maxwell Jenkins’s Joseph, who visits him during the trip, accidentally urinates.
One wonders how Wahlberg might have performed if he and the makers conceived the character in a way that matched the real Bell’s acts more. For your information, Joe Bell appeared in many 2013 news reports regarding the real walk and Jadin’s death. Nevertheless, Wahlberg does nice work here opposite Reid Miller, and he is moving as the movie comes to an end.
Despite its flaws, you may watch this well-intentioned and well-acted drama in Los Angeles cinema halls.