Mark Wahlberg’s early-morning routine would shame the Divine Office of a medieval Cistercian monk. He gets up at 2:30am and then spends 15-20 minutes in prayer. “I read my daily devotionals and I then I go downstairs to exercise and try not to wake my wife or the kids,” he says. “Then I feel pretty good about accomplishing whatever tasks I have to do that day – until I wake up my 16-year-old. That could up-end all my plans, right?”
This sort of self-deprecating humour is at the feisty heart of the highly enjoyable Father Stu, Wahlberg’s film about a former Montana boxer, Stuart Long, who becomes a priest after a near-fatal motorcycle accident. He finds his vocation after falling in love with a young Mexican Catholic woman, Carmen, whom he ditches for God. It’s a deeply personal film in which Wahlberg has teamed up again with fellow Catholic actor Mel Gibson, who plays Father Stu’s alcoholic truck-driver father Bill with brilliant and touching restraint.
