What Charles Harrelson’s life and death added to the biography of Woody Harrelson is not reducible to a lesson or a narrative arc. The son did not become a better actor because his father was a hitman, nor a worse person because his father was a hitman. He did not carry the crimes as a personal responsibility, nor did he disavow the man who committed them. He maintained a relationship with a complicated and morally compromised person because that person was his father and because the relationship was his to have or not to have, and he chose to have it.
This is, in a sense, the most human thing in the story: not the murders, which are extraordinary, but the son’s choice to remain in contact with the murderer, which is ordinary. People maintain relationships with family members who have done terrible things. The specific family member in this case happened to be a convicted federal judge killer, and the specific son happened to become one of the most recognizable actors in American film and television, and the combination of those two facts produced a biography that the public record can document and that resists the simplification that biography, in its most popular forms, tends to impose.
The father killed people. The son made art. The two facts coexist, without canceling each other and without resolving each other, in the specific way that the facts of a life tend to coexist when the life has been long and complicated enough that simple narratives can’t contain it.