Review: 'Beau Is Afraid' is an unholy mess of a movie, a slog of neuroses and an example of giving a director too much slack
Writer-director Ari Aster, the man who spooked us with “Hereditary” and freaked us out with “Midsommar,” gets a chance to indulge his filmmaking impulses and psychological navel-gazing with “Beau Is Afraid” — and, oh my golly, what a mess it is.
Seriously, this is the weirdest and most disgusting thing its star, Joaquin Phoenix, has ever done — and I’m not forgetting about “I’m Still Here,” that godawful fake documentary he made with Casey Affleck that included his obnoxiously deadpan performance on Letterman.
Phoenix plays Beau Wassermann, a jittery, balding man who has a lot to be afraid of — with an apocalypse in progress on the street outside his apartment, and where running across the street to the bodega includes the risk of getting stabbed by a naked crazy man. But what Beau is even more afraid of, as he sometimes tells his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is disappointing his mother (Patti LuPone), who’s expecting Beau to catch a plane and come visit her.
After he misses his plane — a result of losing his apartment keys, and every freaky person in the neighborhood getting in — he calls Mom again, and a UPS driver answers the phone and tells Beau that his mom has died, her head crushed by a falling chandelier.
Beau then gets hit by a delivery van, and wakes up in a different kind of hell: The suspiciously perfect suburban home of Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane). Grace was driving the delivery van, and Roger is a surgeon who dressed Beau’s wounds. They’ve put him up in the room of their teen daughter, Toni (Kylie Rogers), who’s not thrilled with taking the couch and letting a strange man in her bed.
When Beau’s healthy enough to use the phone, he calls his mom’s lawyer (Richard Kind), who hectors Beau by telling him all the funeral plans for his mother are on hold until he gets there.
What follows is a harrowing and confusing journey through the woods, and through Beau’s memories — primarily focusing on a cruise young Beau (Armen Nahapetian) took with Mom (played as a younger woman by Zoe Lister-Jones), when Beau found his first love, Elaine (played at different ages by Julie Antonelli and Parker Posey). There’s also a sequence where Beau stumbles on a theater troupe, and sees an epic saga of his life play out in animation, directed by Chilean animators Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña. This animated section is the only genuinely emotional passage in this bloated, self-indulgent film.
Aster isn’t the first filmmaker to take his neuroses out for a walk for the audience’s viewing pleasure. But, my heavens, he really makes a meal out of it, wallowing in every perceived fault or shortcoming of Beau’s life — without giving the audience any hint of a redeeming quality that would make us care about this mumbling, indecisive, pathetic little worm. Even when we approach some sort of resolution — in predictable Freudian fashion, it all traces back to his mother — we don’t get catharsis, just more self-loathing.
I know of critics, even friends of mine, who liked this movie, who found the beautiful flowers growing out of the giant pile of manure. I have to say I tried, as someone who loved “Hereditary” and liked “Midsommar,” to meet “Beau Is Afraid” at least halfway, to catch the strange vibe Aster was creating and try to connect with it. But in a movie where the main character is a punching bag and every other character is lacing up their boxing gloves, there’s no human component with which I could relate. I choose to think that’s Aster’s failing, not mine.
——
‘Beau Is Afraid’
★
Opens Friday, April 21, in theaters. Rated R for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language. Running time: 179 minutes.