Beau Is Afraid
Have you ever heard the one about the boy who was scared of his mother? “Beau Is Afraid,” which tells that joke for three gobsmacking, sometimes exhausting, always beguiling hours, might have been designed around a riveting performance from Joaquin Phoenix except that in this case it’s actually a stunning physicalization. Here is what it looks like when a boy stops growing up and just ages into a graying body. Making his mouth tiny as if he were still suckling and his voice intensely frail, Phoenix lets his eyes go soft for once (those usually wild orbs that signal something prehistoric within). His character is too innocent for this world. And so will be the story.
The film was written and directed by Ari Aster, who has always been funny; his excellent trauma-filled dramas “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” may indeed contain the horror of relationships, but they are driven by beneath them is a cruel joke about being screwed from birth: dark comedies about the universal fear of losing free will because everyone knows we never had any to begin with. This enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues is about being doomed from birth. It’s Mr. Aster’s funniest movie yet.
Beau is an Aster protagonist in extremis, barely making it in a hellish landscape lovingly detailed by Mr. Aster and production designer Fiona Crombie; Beau’s downtown neighborhood is defined by violence and madness. People fight in the middle of the street; they threaten to jump off buildings, dead bodies lie about like set pieces at some cosmic crime scene. It’s like one of those death per second Busby Berkeley musicals no one went to see except instead of dancing there are murder and mayhem as choreography. Shot through with long time collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski, Mr. Aster surveys this sumptuous chaos as Peter Greenaway did long dining tables in “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” tracking shots that gorgeously capture a sick sad world eating itself alive in broad daylight.
All this world building for Beau is like a furious overture of the towering anxieties we’ll encounter later, present time and in flashback. A lack of personal space, the threat of being unable to please others, rampant bad luck passing through him like food poisoning at a church potluck. Embracing his ruthless sense of humor as never before, Mr. Aster sucks us in with each absurd, claustrophobic development (an angry neighbor keeps sliding him notes to turn down the volume even though he’s sitting in silence), punches up what feels like a punchline to a cosmic joke and laugh to keep from screaming keeps punching. It’s a rollicking first act that establishes rhythm with dread and proves this is not going to be one of those precious movies about keeping it smooth from here on out. Inconsistency can prove disorienting.
But nothing rattles you quite like Beau’s phone calls from Mona Wassermann. The fancy logo with her initials can be seen on almost every item in his dilapidated apartment, over the phone, Patti LuPone plays her mega successful monster mother with exquisite venom that creates immense and unsettling tension simply by making Beau feel even smaller than he already is What if God were smarter? (“I trust you’ll do the right thing,” she says.) After he accidentally misses his flight to see her (it’s a long story), guilt and shame and humiliation are packed into an interaction so familiar no one could accuse it of having free will but rather an obligation to take place exactly as it does every time which doesn’t mean this isn’t new for poor Beau because it is always new for poor Beau not to disappoint Mona Wassermann.
In this movie, Phoenix has long close ups on the phone he is trying to hold everything together, especially after hearing some terrible news about her mother.
“Beau Is Afraid” comes in chapters of different lengths and tones that tell about Beau’s changing sense of safety. After a meltdown which involved screaming naked in the streets, beau wakes up injured and being taken care of by two suburban parents (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who feed him pills and hide their own pain behind just enough smiles. He needs to see his mom tomorrow, they’ll get him there. He has become their dead soldier boy Nathan’s replacement son and now has an enemy in Toni (Kylie Rogers) who is very mad about this strange man sleeping in her rainbow colored bedroom. Everyone brings a fascinating darkness to this smiling horror sequence but Rogers is the chapter’s creepy simulation of nuclear families’ vivid glitch. She storms into each scene like a force of nature should (and there are many forces of nature here), further confusing Beau’s odyssey.
Halfway through “Beau Is Afriad,” the film makes Phoenix sit down so it can go into stop-motion animation that was directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (“The Wolf House”), which is strikingly animated and with in beau is afraid touching sentimental hallucinatory poetic pieces of its complicated headspace movie with in a movie that complements other moments of uncanniness it also adds severely uneven rhythms (like a famous lewd joke “The Aristocrats,” “Beau Is Afraid” loves shapeless tangents for maximum horror effect, sometimes obtuse always distancing). There is also an ending metaphor for the sequence: art becomes so lifelike you don’t even realize how much of yourself is inside it.
“Beau Is Afraid” jumps back in time with young Beau (Armen Nahapetian), which includes a memory on a cruise ship with a young girl who made his mother feel threatened. The scenes are visually stunning for their artificial sets and how much Nahapetian looks like a de aged Phoenix, but also show a fault in Aster’s expanding maximalist vision; he cannot do tenderness enough justice so some heavy handed developments here outwardly empty what should be an inwardly devastating tragedy.
Zoe Lister Jones plays Mona in these scenes, and man oh man what a performance it is. Lister Jones depicts Mona’s control and need while pulling back the curtain on what has made such a monster in beau’s mind, also helping us understand beau. There is one sequence where she lies next to her son under red light telling him about past memories that will fuck him up forever it is goddamn mesmerizing as Lister Jones gives space to each sentence of this traumatic monologue with alarming gentleness after alarming gentleness.
The third act of the film (I’ll avoid specifics) has “beau Is Afraid” showing its true form as an exploitation movie adapted from a therapist’s notepad.
This is full on Grand Guignol psychological and emotional trauma, with some moments of terror, some jaw droppingly cartoonish absurdity and an uneasy past pasted together feeling to go along with the Mariah Carey song. Aster crushes in more revelations, more characters, more explosions of the psychological variety. But for all of its pyrotechnics and it has those fire and brimstone performances it is a febrile work that does not wear well on Aster. Visually it is impressive. The disquieting modern architecture setting looms over its characters like a bad hangover, there are laugh out loud inserted images that level us back down. But like Bobby Krlic’s score’s intense strings that press atonally upon us at such high volume as to become numbing; so too does the centerpiece dialogue that makes for an Oedipal screed and the twists that verge on self-parody. In “Beau Is Afraid”’s grand statement it risks canceling out its intricate but chaotic arrangement into a simple scream.
The film features many surprising performances which bloom in this movie’s off kilter environs (Parker Posey, Denis Ménochet, Stephen McKinley Henderson). But the most important figure in “Beau Is Afraid” is Aster, openly wrestling with his work here. No rule says one needs a certain amount of features before reckoning with their authorship. Appropriately enough, “Beau Is Afraid” feels like a fever dream through the museum of Aster’s previous creations, fascinations. It’s not just the 2011 original short film “Beau”; but also his short “Munchausen,” which features this movie’s Bradley Fisher as “Birthday Boy Stab Man” within C’est la Vie’s hellish city landscape, plus head trauma, communes etc from every other Aster joint. A part of this movie becomes like a retread of what built “Hereditary,” which is only more intensely personal here thanks to terrified boy nodding to his mother via first person point of view shot and bookending scenes. This is the first scene of “Beau Is Afraid.” This is the final scene of “Beau Is Afraid.”
This is all, of course, based on my first viewing. Any admirer of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” knows those films are better understood with multiple viewings closer looks at the mechanics each time. Part of Aster’s extraordinary skill as an entertainer who unveils these plots about horrific relationships resides in how much he lets an audience get on their first viewing vs their second or third. I’m curious most of all about how the emotions within “Beau Is Afraid” will show more intricacy or collapse under their weight once three hours feels more familiar. But like P.T.A.’s own third film “Magnolia” (also three hours), the ambition here is the point. it’s apparent even more how Aster has never made a feature or short! that was lazy or overly assured of itself he never will. After this dizzying but unforgettable experience with Paul Aster, we now know who to thank for that one.
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