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Beau is Afraid, 2023
Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is afraid. Racked by anxieties and doubts, he is meant to go on a visit to see his mother, the wealthy and powerful Mona (Patti LuPone). But Beau’s fear is not just in his head: he lives in a world that is violent and unpredictable, and every time he ventures out of his home, something very bad happens. After some alarming news from home, Beau redoubles his efforts to get home, and is seriously injured. He wakes up in the home of couple Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane), but his quest to get to his home has only just begun.
Wildly uneven from act to act, this one is worth watching for an outstanding first and second act but then slowly (SLOWLY) wears out its welcome.
I almost want to give this movie two different ratings: one for the first 80 minutes, and one for the last 100. I absolutely loved the first two acts, like, LOVED them. The first act follows Beau in his apartment as he tries to get to the airport to catch his flight and the fallout when things begin to go wrong. Beau is a very anxious person, something that has clearly been pushed on him by his mother. One of the hardest parts of having anxiety is that it completely messes with your ability to assess risk. Is that person just hanging out, or are they planning to rob you? Are you experiencing a headache, or a medical disaster? But the brilliant twist in this film is that Beau’s surroundings are the embodiment of all of those outlandish anxious thoughts.
On Beau’s street, a dead body is sprawled in the middle of a road, totally ignored by cars and pedestrians. The news is full of reports of a nude man nicknamed Birthday Boy Stab Man (Bradley Fisher) who is, well, running around stabbing people. A man covered in tattoos (Karl Roy) angrily pursues Beau every time he steps outside of his front door. Even something seemingly innocuous---a man in short-shorts dancing to a radio on the street--seems ominous simply because he never . . . stops . . . dancing. I love this. Like, if your life is dominated by outlandish fears, is it almost a relief to have the world actually match your worries? Does that make you less crazy? All the while during this stretch of the film, Beau’s uncomfortable encounters with other people oscillate between dark humor, social cringe, and straight-up horror. At one point, one of Beau’s neighbors starts slipping notes under Beau’s door demanding that he turn down the music. Beau isn’t playing music. The notes continue to arrive, growing more and more aggressive.
Then we get another fantastic act, this time in the bizarre home of Grace, Roger, and their perpetually angry daughter, Toni (Kylie Rogers). The family is mourning the loss of their son, who was killed in action while serving in the military. The seemingly perfect suburban family hiding dark secrets is a well-established trope, but the film still finds ways to take the premise into new, demented directions. Ryan and Lane are both excellent in a bizarre good cop/good cop arrangement. They both really nail the necessary line between being human and being over the top. Multiple sequences where Toni takes her anger out on Beau in various ways are incredibly uncomfortable, again walking that line between social cringe and genuine horror.
Okay, so far this is a 5-star film and the best movie I’ve seen this year.
And then the third act drops, and the film goes off the cliff edge.
There is certainly plenty to admire in the third act, and it’s really where the film goes for broke in terms of visuals and meta-textual jazz, and there’s lots of creativity on display. But this act is just . . . so . . . long. So long. And as creative as it is, it’s where I started to feel myself uncoupling from what the film was trying to say about Beau and his relationship to the world and to his own life. Put simply: I don’t get it. I don’t get the point of this whole act, despite enjoying it. It feels flashy and ungrounded.
Then we get to the final act, and I have no words. In my opinion, there’s so much wrong with the last 30 minutes (or was it longer? It felt longer) of this film. My main complaint is that this is the point where the movie seemingly loses faith in the audience and just straight up starts explaining things. Yes, there’s some wacky imagery and dark humor in there. But things we understood implicitly are put out there explicitly in a way that adds nothing to our understanding of the character. There’s a long, drawn-out allegorical sequence that was painful to sit through, making points that had already been well made in the two and a half hours of film that came before it. This final act left such a bad taste in my mouth that my feeling toward the whole film was really dragged down.
Threaded through the film are flashbacks in which we see a time in Beau’s youth where he and his mother went on a cruise together and Beau fell into a little romance with a girl named Elaine (Parker Posey as an adult, Julia Antonelli as a teen). Realizing Beau’s affections, Mona does several manipulative things to keep Beau away from Elaine. It’s a pointed, uncomfortable, and profoundly sad look at the way that parents can cultivate an unhealthy intimacy and dependency with their own children. Mona’s abuse of Beau might not be sexual abuse in the classic sense of the word, but she intentionally pathologizes a fear of sexual intimacy in him and uses a general fear to keep him in a perpetually dependent state well into adulthood.
Mona’s wealth and power allow her to have an unprecedented degree of control over Beau’s life, even indirectly. When he goes to a corner store, you can see products from her company in the background. Once I noticed this, I started seeing little nods to Mona’s wide reach in many sequences. There is a lot of great set and costume design on display. (And sidenote: casting Armen Nahapetian as young Beau is a piece of genius).
But all the greatness just makes it that much more frustrating that the film ends in such an overt, unnuanced way. The clever, well-realized figurative work of the first ⅔ gives way to stuff so blatant and obvious that it’s shocking. There’s excellent casting all the way through, but even very welcome faces like Parker Posey and Richard Kind in the last act can’t save something so messy and ill-conceived.
It’s hard to rate a film where I consider the two-thirds to be great and the last act to be borderline unwatchable. I could never watch this movie all the way through again. Just know that despite my rating below, I consider the first 80-90 minutes a film, and will probably revisit those parts in the future.
Beau is Afraid, 2023
Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is afraid. Racked by anxieties and doubts, he is meant to go on a visit to see his mother, the wealthy and powerful Mona (Patti LuPone). But Beau’s fear is not just in his head: he lives in a world that is violent and unpredictable, and every time he ventures out of his home, something very bad happens. After some alarming news from home, Beau redoubles his efforts to get home, and is seriously injured. He wakes up in the home of couple Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane), but his quest to get to his home has only just begun.
Wildly uneven from act to act, this one is worth watching for an outstanding first and second act but then slowly (SLOWLY) wears out its welcome.
I almost want to give this movie two different ratings: one for the first 80 minutes, and one for the last 100. I absolutely loved the first two acts, like, LOVED them. The first act follows Beau in his apartment as he tries to get to the airport to catch his flight and the fallout when things begin to go wrong. Beau is a very anxious person, something that has clearly been pushed on him by his mother. One of the hardest parts of having anxiety is that it completely messes with your ability to assess risk. Is that person just hanging out, or are they planning to rob you? Are you experiencing a headache, or a medical disaster? But the brilliant twist in this film is that Beau’s surroundings are the embodiment of all of those outlandish anxious thoughts.
On Beau’s street, a dead body is sprawled in the middle of a road, totally ignored by cars and pedestrians. The news is full of reports of a nude man nicknamed Birthday Boy Stab Man (Bradley Fisher) who is, well, running around stabbing people. A man covered in tattoos (Karl Roy) angrily pursues Beau every time he steps outside of his front door. Even something seemingly innocuous---a man in short-shorts dancing to a radio on the street--seems ominous simply because he never . . . stops . . . dancing. I love this. Like, if your life is dominated by outlandish fears, is it almost a relief to have the world actually match your worries? Does that make you less crazy? All the while during this stretch of the film, Beau’s uncomfortable encounters with other people oscillate between dark humor, social cringe, and straight-up horror. At one point, one of Beau’s neighbors starts slipping notes under Beau’s door demanding that he turn down the music. Beau isn’t playing music. The notes continue to arrive, growing more and more aggressive.
Then we get another fantastic act, this time in the bizarre home of Grace, Roger, and their perpetually angry daughter, Toni (Kylie Rogers). The family is mourning the loss of their son, who was killed in action while serving in the military. The seemingly perfect suburban family hiding dark secrets is a well-established trope, but the film still finds ways to take the premise into new, demented directions. Ryan and Lane are both excellent in a bizarre good cop/good cop arrangement. They both really nail the necessary line between being human and being over the top. Multiple sequences where Toni takes her anger out on Beau in various ways are incredibly uncomfortable, again walking that line between social cringe and genuine horror.
Okay, so far this is a 5-star film and the best movie I’ve seen this year.
And then the third act drops, and the film goes off the cliff edge.
There is certainly plenty to admire in the third act, and it’s really where the film goes for broke in terms of visuals and meta-textual jazz, and there’s lots of creativity on display. But this act is just . . . so . . . long. So long. And as creative as it is, it’s where I started to feel myself uncoupling from what the film was trying to say about Beau and his relationship to the world and to his own life. Put simply: I don’t get it. I don’t get the point of this whole act, despite enjoying it. It feels flashy and ungrounded.
Then we get to the final act, and I have no words. In my opinion, there’s so much wrong with the last 30 minutes (or was it longer? It felt longer) of this film. My main complaint is that this is the point where the movie seemingly loses faith in the audience and just straight up starts explaining things. Yes, there’s some wacky imagery and dark humor in there. But things we understood implicitly are put out there explicitly in a way that adds nothing to our understanding of the character. There’s a long, drawn-out allegorical sequence that was painful to sit through, making points that had already been well made in the two and a half hours of film that came before it. This final act left such a bad taste in my mouth that my feeling toward the whole film was really dragged down.
Threaded through the film are flashbacks in which we see a time in Beau’s youth where he and his mother went on a cruise together and Beau fell into a little romance with a girl named Elaine (Parker Posey as an adult, Julia Antonelli as a teen). Realizing Beau’s affections, Mona does several manipulative things to keep Beau away from Elaine. It’s a pointed, uncomfortable, and profoundly sad look at the way that parents can cultivate an unhealthy intimacy and dependency with their own children. Mona’s abuse of Beau might not be sexual abuse in the classic sense of the word, but she intentionally pathologizes a fear of sexual intimacy in him and uses a general fear to keep him in a perpetually dependent state well into adulthood.
Mona’s wealth and power allow her to have an unprecedented degree of control over Beau’s life, even indirectly. When he goes to a corner store, you can see products from her company in the background. Once I noticed this, I started seeing little nods to Mona’s wide reach in many sequences. There is a lot of great set and costume design on display. (And sidenote: casting Armen Nahapetian as young Beau is a piece of genius).
But all the greatness just makes it that much more frustrating that the film ends in such an overt, unnuanced way. The clever, well-realized figurative work of the first ⅔ gives way to stuff so blatant and obvious that it’s shocking. There’s excellent casting all the way through, but even very welcome faces like Parker Posey and Richard Kind in the last act can’t save something so messy and ill-conceived.
It’s hard to rate a film where I consider the two-thirds to be great and the last act to be borderline unwatchable. I could never watch this movie all the way through again. Just know that despite my rating below, I consider the first 80-90 minutes a film, and will probably revisit those parts in the future.