Weekend Watch - Beau Is Afraid
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster’s latest directorial exploit, starring Joaquin Phoenix in the film’s titular role, supported by Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, Julia Antonelli, and Stephen McKinley Henderson. With its wide release coming this weekend, the film has already received the monicker of “divisive” from both critics and audiences – praising the film’s direction and performances but coming down less cohesively positive on the story. Let’s get into it.
Letter Grade: B+; this film simply isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it could have been made slightly more accessible with just a few edits (maybe just one, honestly).
Should you Watch This Film? I don’t exactly know who this film is for, but I think if you’re looking for a film that captures the feeling of an anxiety-induced nightmare, then you’ll leave feeling satisfied.
Why?
Beau Is Afraid, for me, is the best of Ari Aster’s feature films (I still don’t think he’s reached the pinnacle of cinema that is his short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons yet). In this film, the polarizing up-and-comer has stepped into his own vision, possibly even his own genre, driven by Freudian psychology, existential dread, and some truly excellent filmmaking choices. Aster never misses with his casting choices, and Beau Is Afraid again hits those character choices right on the nose with its ensemble of character actors and headliner of Phoenix. He also has managed to create a near-perfect rendering of a stress nightmare, not really terrifying for any conventional reasons, just incredibly off-putting with a constant waiting for the other shoe to drop.
With its easily recognizable themes of parental manipulation, guilt, and the societal disconnect that comes when mental health issues are not properly and positively addressed and treated, Beau Is Afraid sometimes strays a little bit too far from the new road that it seeks to pave. The Freudian themes and symbols of Beau’s oedipal complex sometimes gets carried away, serving to distract from the film rather than enhance it. Don’t get me wrong, a phallic symbol here and a yonic symbol there tends to be par for the course in any film that even touches on human sexuality, but usually there’s not a large monster that derails your focus on the entire third act because you’re trying to figure out what it was there for. I won’t go into any more detail than that for fear of spoilers, but I feel like however that particular scene is interpreted (and if you’ve already seen this film, you know exactly the scene I’m talking about), it doesn't actually make the film better, it just makes it weirder. For the rest of the film, the weirdness is set to just the right scale to not derail the themes or the story, but that single choice knocks the whole film down a notch for me because it’s all people seem to be wanting to talk about. They breeze over the excellence of the first two acts and don’t really engage with the creativity of the film’s last scene just to talk about this one other scene. It’s undeniably memorable because, clearly, I’m in the same boat, but I feel that the film is just as memorable and noteworthy without that particular interpretation of Freudian expression.
The rest of the film works incredibly well, though. Joaquin Phoenix delivers yet another performance as a disturbed man living in a world that seems to be aggressively against him (whether that’s just in his mind or not). He’s asked to do a lot by Aster’s script, but he delivers on it all, playing the harried, guilt-ridden son with just the right amount of untrustworthiness to get the film’s setting to feel off for the audience. The rest of the cast fills the world out incredibly well. LuPone’s performance as Beau’s mother Mona might be one of the best “villain” performances in such a film – feeling like maybe the only real and honest character in the whole film with her overt selfishness and callousness toward the rest of the world. Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, and Kylie Rogers have all the makings of the ideal family with a dark secret just under the surface, and they play their part in Beau’s story with just the right blend of levity and ominousness. Like I said, Aster is a master of putting his actors in the best possible situations for their skillsets.
Visually and in its pacing, Beau Is Afraid truly feels like an extended nightmare/dream sequence, alternating depending on the vibe of the scene. Every frame of the film feels just off enough to instill in the audience the same sense of unease (and sometimes dread) that Beau feels, sometimes with comic results, sometimes with heart-pounding ones. Combine that with the film’s pacing, sometimes frenetic, other times methodical, and you get a film that never really feels as long as its near-three-hour runtime would lead you to expect. The level of detail in every shot help to accentuate the film’s immaculate vibes, with plenty of Easter eggs and visual comedy for the observant members of the audience, moving things along that much quicker.
Beau Is Afraid is a well-designed, excellently acted, and mostly well-written piece of filmmaking whose last act is marred somewhat by the only bit of the film that can truly be called divisive but that manages to stick its landing – uncomfortable, strange, and unique as it is. Fans of Aster’s non-horror works will probably be more pleased with the way this film plays out than other audience members, but I do think that it’s possible to enjoy most of this film for most adult audiences. That last act might be a dealbreaker, though, and I totally understand if you never watch this or at least put it off until it’s out of theaters.
