Triumph of the Mel: How Hollywood welcomed back Mel Gibson

People have been talking about a Mel Gibson comeback for so long it makes you wonder did he ever go anywhere? Wilderness!? What wilderness?

“Will Hollywood let this outsider back in?” wrote Owen Gleiberman in Variety in 2016, and if so, will it be as “a walking sinner or a tarnished saint?” “Time for a comeback?” asked the Daily Telegraph in 2014, after Gary Oldman suggested that we should all learn to “take a fucking joke“ when it comes to Gibson. In March 2011, Peter Biskind mapped out the star's troubles in a sympathetic profile for Vanity Fair entitled The Rude Warrior, a headline that suggested Gibson had used the wrong fork. In 2010, the BBC culture pages debated a potential comeback with Oliver Stone arguing if he could play a villain “he could flip it.”

As well as Stone and Oldman, Gibson had a galaxy of other stars offering their support. Robert Downey Jr – who had been the beneficiary of Gibson’s generosity when his own career was on the skids – repaid him by urging the industry to forgive him. Whoopi Goldberg insisted he was not a racist on The View. Colleagues like Richard Donner and Danny Glover spoke up for him. And Jodie Foster directed Gibson in one of his early comeback performances in The Beaver, albeit one so poor it felt like karmic punishment anyway. The film premiered at the same Cannes where Lars Von Trier was declared “persona non grata”, while Gibson took to the red carpet and received the Croisette’s welcome-back applause.

The fall and rise of Mel Gibson

The fall had been dramatic. Mel Gibson had it all. One of the most bankable action stars of the 80s and 90s, he’d also nailed Hamlet for Franco Zeffirelli and proved his mettle as director with the Oscar-winning epic Braveheart. He'd also amassed a massive personal fortune thanks to his “one for me” passion project The Passion of the Christ. But when the LA police pulled him over for speeding in 2006, things unraveled fast. A stream of anti-Semitic invectives chimed too easily with accusations of bigotry that had already floated over his movies, as well as the ideas of his father Hutton Gibson, an ultra-right wing catholic, famous for denying the Holocaust happened. Further scandal came with the release of a phone recording to Gibson’s former partner, a vicious roaring unhinged diatribe of misogyny and racism, including threats of violence.

Dropped by his agent and ostracised by many in the film community, Gibson’s career undoubtedly took a hit. But with a series of shame-faced semi-apologies, Gibson never really went away. In 2010, he was already back with Edge of Darkness – albeit without Robert De Niro who walked following clashes with his co-star. Likewise, his directing career wasn’t exactly in ruins. There’s a ten-year gap between Apocalypto and Hacksaw Ridge, but that’s almost the same as between Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ and his latest film received six Oscar nominations, including significantly Best Director for Gibson personally.

The Wild Bunch and Gibson's return

Some moves were stymied – his appearance in one of The Hangover movies was blocked by a fellow actor – but his casting has swiftly become an in-joke, as in The Expendables 3 or more recently Daddy’s Home 2. In S Craig Zahler’s upcoming thriller Dragged Across Concrete, Gibson plays a tough cop who listens to his captain Don Johnson telling him “being accused of being racist these days is like being called a Communist in the 1950s,” while Gibson nods in agreement.

And now Gibson is directing the remake of bloody western The Wild Bunch. Hearing the news, the move made total sense from a Hollywood perspective. From a creative point of view, given the slow-motion blood-bejeweled battle scenes of Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson is supremely qualified, and the parallels between Gibson’s own travails and the 1969 tale of a bunch of aging gun fighters heading south of the border to go out in a blaze of glory are too sweet. The feature pieces are going to write themselves.

Many will think forgive and forget. And ironically, the #MeToo movement might even have helped Gibson, with his misdeeds disappearing in the haze of fresher culprits and accusations. In the meantime, we can forget that according to screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and Winona Ryder, he repeatedly referred to Jews as oven-dodgers. And we can forget also that, as The Atlantic pointed out recently, many of his public utterances about his past have been of the sorry-not-sorry variety. Ultimately, this isn’t about Mel Gibson’s redemption, but about his triumph.