Can you forgive him? Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge return

Eleven years after he became a byword for shame and disgrace, Mel Gibson is once again an Oscar candidate. Hacksaw Ridge is his first film as a director since 2006, and its star Andrew Garfield is nominated for best actor. But Gibson's full-blooded take on the true tale of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who refused to bear arms but won the Medal of Honour after heroically saving more than 70 soldiers as a medic in Okinawa, reminds us of his artistic virtues and vices.

Inspired by unfashionable, patriotic Pacific war films such as the Errol Flynn potboiler Objective, Burma, its visceral battle scenes pummel the viewer, as heroic US troops are destroyed by fanatical Japanese hordes. Earlier sequences, meanwhile, valourise the piously religious, simple country upbringing of Garfield’s Doss. When blood sluices from him after battle, he recalls Jesus in Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2002). Whether Gibson’s sins can be washed away is Hacksaw Ridge’s Hollywood subtext.

His downfall had been brutally swift. Stopped by police for speeding in July 2006, he was found to be drunk, with an open bottle of tequila by his side. “Fucking Jews,” he then blurted to the arresting officers. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” This anti-Semitic outburst was soon made public, and linked to the beliefs of Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, a member of an extremist Christian sect, Catholic Traditionalism, which blames Jews for the crucifixion, as The Passion of the Christ also does.

In 2008, tapes of Mel Gibson bestially grunting and snorting as he threatened his girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva confirmed an ugly streak of anger and prejudice. “I am going to come and burn the fucking house down ... but you will blow me first,” he raged. “You look like a f***ing bitch in heat and if you get raped by a pack of n****** it will be your fault.” Deciding if his filmmaking talent can eventually outweigh such words is a question as old as Hollywood.

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As Hacksaw Ridge is released in the UK this week, the French are debating another notorious, hugely talented figure. The original choice of Roman Polanski as president of this year’s Cesars (France’s Oscar equivalent) – he has now dropped out following backlash – recognises his brilliance as the director of Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. But it has been widely condemned because of the rape charges against him following an incident with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in Hollywood in 1977. Fleeing the US before a trial which he was warned would end in him being jailed for 42 years, he has been an exile in fear of extradition ever since. Gailey herself (now named Geimer after marriage) eventually forgave Polanski, and wishes him no further punishment. The director’s crime is also balanced by his suffering as a Jewish child in the Krakow ghetto during the Holocaust. His Oscar for his film set in that period, The Pianist (2002), was the Hollywood ending to his shame.

A new DVD release, meanwhile, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage, tells another wartime tale, and reminds us of another talent brought low by personal flaws. It’s the story of the crew of the US ship that was torpedoed while returning from delivering components of the atom bomb, the mission’s secrecy leaving hundreds of its crew to be eaten by sharks. Nicolas Cage stars, but Tom Sizemore is equally memorable. In the late Nineties, Sizemore was a riveting character actor on the point of stardom after roles in Heat and Saving Private Ryan. This was itself a story of redemption, after a history of drug addiction. But drugs and lurid debauchery brought him low again, sealed by his 2005 conviction for assaulting “Hollywood madam” Heidi Fleiss. All his old volatile charisma and fast-talking nerviness are on display in his new film. Time will tell if he ever again gets the roles he’s capable of.

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Separating art from fallible artists is a quandary that recurs through the decades. Leni Riefenstahl is the most infamous director of all, because of Triumph of the Will (1934) and Olympia (1938), documentaries loved for their high and hugely influential style, and loathed for their subjects – respectively, the 1934 Nazi Nuremberg rally and Hitler’s Munich Olympics. As an independent film-maker, Riefenstahl was less entwined with the Nazi regime than many other German directors, who quietly resumed their careers after the war. She denied complicity, and knowledge of the Holocaust. But it’s impossible to extricate her work from its murderous time. What, though, are we to make of Sergei Eisenstein’s great work made in Stalin’s Soviet Union, a regime of equivalent savagery? His conflicted, coded response to it is held to absolve him. Still, like Fellini’s start in Mussolini’s fascist film industry, a filmmaker’s era can’t always be escaped.

Back in Hollywood, scandal more usually involves sex and money. Silent comedy star Fatty Arbuckle’s 1921 trial for the rape and manslaughter of Virginia Rappe at a party, though he was acquitted, gave the town its reputation as a modern Gomorrah, and ended his career. The greatest star of all, Charlie Chaplin, was then ruined after decades of unbroken success by his 1943 trial for transporting 22-year-old Joan Barry (30 years his junior) across state lines for “immoral purposes”. Though he too was acquitted, a paternity case later that year saw him condemned by Barry’s lawyer as a “grey-haired old buzzard” and “little runt of a Svengali”. He had previously survived his wife Lita Chaplin’s still more lurid, 52-page petition for divorce in 1927, which alluded to then-illegal sodomy and oral sex. But back then, he had been the most famous and beloved man in the world. Much later in his career, the seediness stuck. His next film, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), in which he played a serial killer of women, seemed, like The Passion of the Christ, to confirm his distasteful nature. Its premiere was booed and hissed. It was Chaplin’s first flop, and the American public rejected all his subsequent work.

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Aged 61, Gibson, too, has seen a natural dissipation of his appeal as an actor. His last two starring roles, in Get the Gringo (2012) and Blood Father (2016), were well-reviewed commercial duds. Hacksaw Ridge, though, is already a hit in the US, and received a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. In its best moments, it recalls the exhilarating, daring velocity of his previous film as a director, the 16th century-set, Mayan-language Apocalypto (2006). The talent and bull-headed determination behind that and the mostly Aramaic-language The Passion of the Christ has clearly survived his alcoholic outburst of racism and misogyny a decade ago.

“I’ve done a lot of work on myself these last 10 years,” he recently reflected to Deadline. “I’ve deliberately kept a low profile ... I think the best way somebody can show they’re sorry is to fix themselves and that’s what I’ve been doing, and I’m just happy to be here.” Hollywood clearly believes he’s served his time. An Oscar would confirm his human, horrible mistakes have been forgiven. With the artist absolved, appreciating his art can resume.