Wensley Clarkson - Mel Gibson--Man on a Mission

IF YOU HAVE NO GREAT EXPECTATIONS, YOURE NOT GOING TO BE DISAPPOINTED.

L et me upstage a star and beat him to the draw in stating something: you are starting a study which is bound to disturb, distress and infuriate its subject, Mel Columbcille Gerard Gibson.

For the great paradox of one of the screens best-known men is that hardly anyone knows him. Stonewalling his way through reluctantly granted interviews or dancing out of range behind smokescreens of ingenuous charm and engagingly mocking flippancy, Mel Gibson is intent on keeping it that way. The upfront guy of the movies is a fiercely private person.

Accordingly, and strangely, Gibson will resent disclosure of a record in which most people would take pride: a child growing up in hard times, under an equally hard paternal regime, with virtually no material advantages, who has triumphed in the most competitive, least forgiving arena on earth Hollywood.

This book is clear-eyed rather than rose-tinted, certainly. You must decide whether Gibson emerges as its hero, anti-hero or merely the central character. For him, such findings are irrelevant. Refusing to write his own life story, he resents anyone else daring to simply because it is about him, and thats enough to rankle with an embattled man who loathes undue scrutiny and is almost superstitiously anxious to keep himself to himself and his family circle.

Mel would be extremely happy if the printing press had not been invented. Partly because he has managed to persuade himself that hes pretty good at just another job, as it might be plumbing or running a supermarket. The customers ought to be content to judge him on whether the taps have been fixed, the produce is fresh or if they have been taken out of themselves by his latest picture. Leave it at that, huh?

Aint never going to happen, as the modern American proverb goes. Having elevated the Ordinary Joe to titanic stature, or at least, wide-screen scale, Mel Gibson suffers from the iron law that anyone kindling the imaginations of untold millions is bound to ignite their curiosity as well. Whats he really like what makes him tick?

Good questions, especially since he guards the answers. Depressingly few Great Big Stars are very interesting people. Many bear the hallmarks of a conventional, dull family background; either their college major was performing arts, leading on to theatre work, or they had high school dreams and broke through via modelling or TV soaps and ho-hum. Mel Gibson, thank God to whom his extremist, vastly influential father, Red Gibson, believes he may have a direct line, by the way isnt like that.

Yes, he went to drama school, more or less by accident and not particularly willingly, either. Thats the only suggestion of Hollywood cookie-cutter uniformity. This man is a true original, a one-off on two legs.

Little about the erstwhile Mad Max is stereotyped, predictable. Even his hell-raising, while its wine, women and song trail was blazed by bygones like Errol Flynn, has unique ingredients of flinty honesty and good, old-fashioned Catholic guilt.

Other megastars drive themselves to get bigger or, at worst, cling to their rung on the platinum ladder. Mel Gibson dreams of giving it all up, to farm beef-cattle full time. His peers prattle, between one divorce and the next, of family values and their wonderful wife and kids. The one sure bet about Mel Gibson is that, if forced to choose between fame and career or his adored family, hed be out of there and back home for good, the moment the choice was presented.

Movie-making is much like war, which has been said to be 90 per cent boredom while waiting for 10 per cent of frenetic activity. Making movies outside a studio, often right off the map, is worse, through offering fewer home comforts. Steam needs letting off, empty evenings must be filled when it comes to disgraceful behaviour, the main difference between a film team and a rock group, out on the road, is that the band generally sings in key

This has led to a conscience-salving aphorism: On location, it doesnt count. In other words, when the cameras stop rolling and the picture is over, so are the affairs.

Given Mel Gibsons tendency to run off the rails, one would expect him to have taken full advantage of being on location. Not so he seems consciously to distance himself from the actresses and female technicians, many of whom would love to hang his celebrity scalp from their suspender-belts.

The message seems to be that Mel prefers the company of non-industry people, especially on occasions when he has lost self-control and gone over the high side. Intriguingly, he has only ever been tempted when away from film business territory. Apart from a genuine, unpatronising liking for real people, Mel still does not really trust Hollywood, or the motives of its denizens when they are eager to be his buddies.

As we shall see, his doubts are well founded.

Until Christmas of 1990, he fought a losing battle against alcoholism one unfortunate side-effect being a string of brief, generally boozy, encounters with women outside the business.

Astonishingly, none of these women has anything unkind or even reproachful to say about him. He was, they could argue, deceiving nobody except his wife. Its likely that Mel Gibson subscribes to the philosophy that what a wife doesnt know cant hurt her. Certainly, his strict Catholic upbringing at Gibson Seniors hands appears to have given him some highly reactionary views on women.