‘Father Stu’ reminder of redemption

Sometimes we all need a little reminder that the worst of us is redeemable.

Those of us who’ve read the Good Book know the deal. A trickster and a flimflam artist can be chosen as the father of 12 tribes of a chosen people. A woman can start out a prostitute and end up being an ancestor to a Savior. A dude can go from killer to leading his people out of slavery. Another can go from being a rigid, persecution-meting stickler for the law to a devoted follower of the very one he once persecuted others for following. God’s funny that way. He has used all of the above people, taking them from their formers to their latters.

Even the nonbelievers have to admit to being pleasantly surprised when people once labeled as writeoffs (or charge-offs) turn their lives around.

I personally love reading and hearing the stories of these people. People like Nicky Cruz, who went from severely abused boy to dangerous gang warlord to beloved Christian evangelist. Like the late Denise Matthews, the drug abusing performer first known to us as Vanity of girl group Vanity 6 — they of “Nasty Girl” fame — and who also turned to a life of evangelism. And, Father Stu.

A friend and I went the other Friday to see “Father Stu,” the movie based on Father Stuart Long, a Montana native whose route to the priesthood was, to say the least, circuitous. He passed away in 2014 at age 50 from inclusion body myositis (IBM), a disease that closely mimics Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“Father Stu, as he was affectionately known, was a late vocation to the priesthood,” reads a story about the movie at catholicworldreport. com. “He pursued careers in boxing, acting, teaching, and museum management before his ordination in 2007 for the Diocese of Helena. He is also remembered for his no-nonsense and, at times, rough demeanor.”

The movie trailer leaped out at me and jumped on my back like some diminutive attacker in a fight scene in a Don Knotts movie. (We’ve all seen it, especially the part where Stu is telling his mom he wants to be a priest and she looks at him like he’s grown three heads and three tails and responds, “For Halloween?”)

We’d been warned beforehand that this wasn’t your usual faithbased movie. I figured as much with it having an R rating. The last, and only other, R-rated, faith-based movie I went to see was “The Passion of the Christ.”

That one got its rating from its elements of brutality and gore. This one got its R rating largely from its language. I’d seen a snippet of Mark Wahlberg, who plays

Father Stu in the film, discussing the movie and how it didn’t back away one bit from how Stu lived before joining the Roman Catholic Church and, later, going for the priesthood.

Granted, movies take artistic license with things, but if this one is to believed, Stu could out-drink Hemingway, barroom-brawl like these were Olympic events, and darn-near out-cuss Samuel L. … and his co-star Mel Gibson, known for his colorful language in real life and who definitely gave it all his mouth had in this movie.

Someone who’s used to such faith fare as “War Room,” “Fireproof” and “The Shack” will definitely be jarred by pre-Father Stu making slang references to his own more sensitive body parts. And whew, cussing his way through confessional.

Trying not to give away too much here, but I spent the movie spread out in my recliner theater chair laughing myself silly, then feeling guilty because said laughing was usually prompted by some profane quip from Stu, alcoholic dad Bill (Gibson) or mom Kathleen (Jacki Weaver). Also laugh-worthy were other characters’ introductions to Stu and their reactions, which ranged from eye-rolling to — in the case of the monsignor who got Stu’s unusual seminary application — non-plusment. And there were those mugshot poses; don’t want to leave those out.

With the laughter came the dismay, the (inner) cheering, the tears, the desire to want to blurt out a Protestant church “shout,” and the wish that I could have met this guy, as the movie ran its course.

“Father Stu” — which got a nod in this paper, but the reviewer questioned the casting of Mel Gibson — has its detractors, including the reviewer in The Daily Texan who wrote that it “fails to be original, falling victim to typical cliches.”

“The writing … exaggerates all the negatives in Father Stu’s life to make it appear as if every odd was against him,” according to that review. “This becomes particularly evident in the subplot about Stu’s failed acting career which brings him to Los Angeles. This comes off as artificial, disrespecting the true strength and grit Father Stu embodied in real life … ‘Father Stu’ does not do justice to Father Stu’s life.”

But if somebody age 17 or older needs a figurative bucket of ice water like this movie to be shown or reminded that the worst of us can transform into the best of us, its flaws can be overlooked. Just like Father Stu’s were.