'Beau Is Afraid' Is An Interesting, Bloated Film
Some experimental films are hypnotic, others humorous. Movies like Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive are distinct because audiences can interpret their banalities with different results. What one person thinks the movie means is completely different from someone else's interpretation of the film. Ari Aster's latest movie is his most ambitious and his clumsiest. The journey the audience takes with Beau is psychedelic, in which the joy of the high wears off quickly. Beau Is Afraid is a film that looks up to the works of David Lynch and Franz Kafka but lacks the intrigue they both have. What we're left with is a film that's moderately interesting and stylistically invigorating.
Beau resides in an undisclosed city that makes Chicago's street violence look quaint. Civilians act like Grand Theft Auto caricatures, openly committing crimes and violence without repercussions from the police. Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) is a man who lives an unfulfilling life where urban decay threatens him every day. Beau's mother, Mona (Patti LuPone), invites her son to come back home so she can see him. Through a series of unfortunate events, Beau cannot make the flight to see his mother. Sadly, that turns out to be Beau's last chance to visit her.
Having suddenly died, Beau grieves over his mother while everyone in the film's Kafkaesque world mistreats Beau. Beau must set up the burial arrangements for his mother but is having difficulty doing so on account of recovering from a car injury and stabbing. To add to the pain, everyone tells Beau what a terrible son he was to his mother.
The humor in Beau Is Afraid is dark and twisted with a hint of nihilism. The outlook writer/director Ari Aster has on the world is exaggerated to cartoonish heights, yet, it's part of the film's charm. The city Beau lives in is such a hell hole; it's funny. While someone is stabbed to death, another person dances around naked. Everything looks like The Purge on crack. To be more accurate, it looks like another day in 2020. The setting in Beau Is Afraid is cranked up to 11, hardly allowing time for Beau to adjust to the horror surrounding him.
Ari Aster composes an interesting, if not tiresome, narrative. When the banal elements of the film happen, it's initially interesting. From the moment Beau enters the world, he's surrounded by fear. The film opens with Beau's delivery from the womb. The screen is dark, and the sound is muffled. Then, we hear a large boom! And another. Exiting the womb, Mona pleads desperately to see if her boy is okay. The doctors can't answer Mona since they have to give the child emergency procedures so it can breathe. Beau entered the world in horror and has never stopped living in terror.
Aster isn't afraid to take chances blending dream from reality, intentionally disassociating the viewer. As a fan of the bizarre, the style works for me initially, but within three hours, it withers away. The story is about a man coming to terms with his abusive mother. The exception to this film is Beau never successfully understands his unnecessary guilt. He's a man who lives in fear of Mom for not letting go of his closeted anger toward her. The movie never makes it clear whether what we're watching is real. Is the film a figment of Beau's imagination, or is it really happening?
When the movie kicks into high gear within its third act, it gets extremely bizarre. Joaquin Phoenix renders a fine performance similar to Arthur Fleck (Joker). Both characters have mentally imbalanced mothers. They both suffer from mental illness in a world engulfed in urban decay. They both seek therapy which does little for them, and both movies make us question if the film is happening or is in the protagonist's head. For my money, Joker did it better.
Joker is an exaggerated, expressionistic form of cinema that grounds itself just enough to make the world it takes place in believable. Did Arthur actually shoot Murray Franklin in the head while being applauded as a hero for the low-income class? Possibly not, but maybe it did happen. Beau Is Afraid's closing events are so over the top that the film plays as a dark comedy, which works for the most part but grows tiresome as the extremely long length ticks on. If the film were two hours, it could have been a much better flick that condenses its third act making the effects more potent on the audience.
What could be a great film is just a good one, which is disappointing given some memorable moments. One that comes to mind is from Stephen McKinley Henderson, who plays Beau's therapist, which was equally hilarious and disturbing. Beau Is Afraid is Director Ari Aster's longest and silliest film. Nothing will prepare you for what's in the attic. Hereditary remains Aster's best film, thanks to a phenomenal performance by Toni Collette. Where Hereditary examines grief through a more condensed and effective prism, Beau Is Afraid bloats its themes more than they resonate.
