Mel Gibson was recently seen at the Cannes Film Festival to promote the Jodie Foster-directed “The Beaver” (watch trailer below). And I’m thinking, ‘this could be the start of redemption for Gibson, a sort of “Wrestler” moment for the troubled star whose career took a nose-dive years ago after he started making anti-semitic comments in public and spouting off racial slurs on a phone conversation with his daughter, which happened to be taped.

But was he on the road to redemption last week? It’s really hard to tell, and did that Cannes outing help the actor? I asked Eric Kohn of Indiewire, who told me, ‘short of a new identity, which isn’t entirely out of the question, I don’t think anything can heal Gibson’s reputation. Even before those tapes came out, he was in pretty bad shape–none of his movies had been making money, and he was generally seen as either a bigot, a bully or both. “The Beaver” got mixed reviews and flopped, which is another way of saying that the people have spoken.

His reputation has been permanently soured, and unless he can find a project or a new public image that rebuilds his public standing from the ground up, it seems to me that little will change.”