Gleiberman Calls Mel Gibson a “Furious Talent,” and Wonders If Hollywood Can “Forgive” Him

In his latest column for Variety, The Mel Gibson Comeback: Will Hollywood Let This Outsider Back In? Owen Gleiberman wonders whether or not Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge will earn the admiration of the industry with awards recognition. He writes:

His infamous anti-Semitic tirade seemed to be expressing powerful beliefs (to explain it away by saying “I was drunk” explains next to nothing), and for those of us who heard the leaked recordings of Gibson ranting at his ex-partner Oksana Grigoriev — every word a raging scream, every word charged with violence — it’s a sound that we’ll never get out of our heads. There are many in Hollywood who won’t work with him again. Yet “Hacksaw Ridge” marks a turning point: the film industry as a whole — as a system — saying, “Okay, it’s time.” As a critic, I can understand why. Mel Gibson is a man who seems ruled by a bottomless rage, but he’s also an artist-star possessed of a furious talent, and there are many who feel that he has the right to put the sins of his past behind him.

Gleiberman explains it further:

It’s worth noting that the estrangement between Gibson and Hollywood was under way well before the scandal. Gibson had been lurking outside the system since at least 2004, when he released “The Passion of the Christ.” That film was attacked in the press, notably in a series of columns by Frank Rich in The New York Times, before it even came out, and when people got a chance to see it, most critics were decisively negative (in my opinion, unjustly). They treated the intensity of the film’s violence as if it were some sort of exploitation movie — the Jesus saga as a debased S&M freak show — when, in truth, Gibson wasn’t turning Christ’s suffering into a religious slasher film. He was trying to restore the primal shock and awe to the New Testament.

When “The Passion of the Christ” became more outrageously popular than anyone in the press might have anticipated, it placed Gibson at the center of a culture war. On the one side were the representatives of the “secular” media, along with a Hollywood perceived (rightly or wrongly) as being hostile to the cinematic expression of faith. On the other side was Gibson, the prodigal bad-boy Traditionalist Catholic who had to go outside conventional channels to make his Christ film (in fact, he bankrolled it himself), but who demonstrated — through the logic of the marketplace, and the symbolic logic of the culture war — that his audience was just as huge and devoted as Hollywood’s. He made an “anti-mainstream” Christian psychodrama that suddenly looked like the new mainstream. (As Cecil B. DeMille, or maybe Michael Eisner, would put it: $370 million in gross domestic ticket revenues can’t be wrong.) Gibson had tapped into a different mainstream, a red-state megaplex Evangelical groundswell. And that set the stage for something it’s easier to see now than it was then.

Indeed, when a $300 blockbuster made by a previous Oscar winner was ignored, most of us figured something had to be up.

The question should not be, “can Hollywood forgive Mel Gibson.” The truth is, it’s not Hollywood’s place to forgive Mel Gibson. The very idea of this should be insulting to Oscar voters, and insulting to anyone who covers these awards. Oscar voters, last time I checked, aren’t children. They’re capable of awarding great art whether or not they approve of someone’s personal life, or at least they should be. We are in a dangerous area once we reward them for shunning someone for past mistakes. It’s really as simple as that. Sure, every filmmaker wants to be amiable and find mutual respect with Academy members, and everyone on the edge of the inner circle either wants to influence them or at least pretend they’re one of them, but the press is tip-toeing too much around this narrative, I think.

Gleiberman’s piece smartly dodges whether Academy approval is something Gibson should seek. I suspect Mel Gibson is smart enough, self-assured enough, and enough of a man of faith to know, that 1) let he who has never sinned cast the first stone, and 2) there is really only one worthy judge.

I am not a person of faith, I should add, and am probably an atheist when you get right down to it, but the one thing I absolutely cannot stand is hypocrisy. So if the question is whether Hollywood can forgive Mel Gibson so that Mel Gibson can win Oscars, I’d say Gibson is probably aiming higher, and should aim higher than that.

If the question is whether or not they can “forgive” him — well, whatever forces caused them to reject him in the first place probably still exist. If Oscar voters really want to be the kind of people who judge the art on such petty, irrational impulses, I might say they’re not the people who should be put in the position of judging the merits of art. But perhaps we should drill a little deeper into Academy psychology.

I have always believed that, for the most part, give or take an example or two, a great many voters either want to be you or they want to fuck you. If they want to be you, you’re probably the great young white hope coming down the pike who has not yet compromised his ideals for a paycheck, not yet been built up and torn down by an industry and its willing participants. Or else they wish they could be you because you’re the wise old sage who can still knock it out of the park, like Clint Eastwood, Robert Altman or Terrence Malick. Despite his political leanings towards Donald Trump and despite (or who knows, perhaps because of) his politically incorrect American Sniper, Eastwood is still in the admiration camp.

If Clint Eastwood is acceptable and Mel Gibson is not, we’re left with the only other conclusion we can draw — and that’s this questionable generalization: “the Academy is comprised predominantly of Jews.” True? Not true? No one has ever done any kind of survey to see how true it might be.  It could very well be that this assumption was more accurate in the 1930s or 1950s, but times have changed. In recent decades wouldn’t it seem likely that the Academy’s gradual move to embrace inclusiveness has extended to diversity of religious beliefs as well? At the risk of making more unsupported assumptions, there seems little reason to think that any branch of the AMPAS invites new members based on where a filmmaker attends church, beyond perhaps some of the older traditional veterans in the Executive and and Producers Branch. But it’s funny, isn’t it, that no one ever ventured to ask, “Can Hollywood forgive Clint Eastwood for pretending President Obama was an empty chair and talking down to it at the 2012 Republican National Convention?” The question doesn’t have to be asked, nor should it be, because in Eastwood’s case, as in Woody Allen’s case, the work speaks for itself. And the work should speak for itself. An individual’s personal beliefs have no business in determining the artistic worth of their creations.

I am not now nor have I ever been one of those people who believes character judgments have any place in awarding honors for art. I find it to be not just another creepy behavior by humans who are all too inclined towards creepy behavior, but worse, an irrelevant factor that invalidates the point of having a competition for best of the year.  Sadly, that doesn’t prevent it from happening anyway. It should not be a personality contest (it is), and it should not be a character contest (but it is). None of that should come into play (but it does). In the end, the Academy votes for whom they like best, and a lot of extraneous nonsense goes into why they like (or dislike) someone, much of it not necessarily pertinent to the films or performances they believe are best. This is perhaps probably why the Oscars are ultimately more a time capsule that reflects popularity rather than the enduring quality of work. Think of it like signing dedications in a high school yearbook.

Now people will be waiting and guessing whether or not Hacksaw Ridge will get any nominations. Even if it makes a lot of money and receives great reviews, there will be that superfluous question hanging over the proceedings. It seems clear that one filmmaker this year will already be shut out completely for something he did 17 years ago. We all go along with this penalty like it’s okay because most people are too afraid to speak up against the hive mind. For a multitude of reasons, Nate Parker isn’t going to get the same kinds of chances Mel Gibson had and will continue to have. Parker never had that much power to begin with and too many people seem determined to nip his future opportunities in the bud.

The bottom line is this: do Oscar voters treat the awards like a popularity contest? YES. Without a doubt.
Should they? NO, they should not. Without a doubt. If Hacksaw Ridge or The Birth of a Nation are worthy of awards, then by god, they should be nominated for those honors, whether or not voters approve of their past transgressions.