Guilty as charged! “Beau Is Afraid,” three hours of bleak wonderment that feels, well, like three hours of bleak wonderment, Beau Wassermann awaits the start of his latest therapy session with a look that suggests a man awaiting his executioner. Played to the clammy hilt by Joaquin Phoenix, Beau speaks as if words came as easily as passing kidney stones, on the topic of how he’s feeling about going home to visit his manipulative mother, played by Broadway giant Patti LuPone.
The therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) listens, then writes one word in his notebook, just out of Beau’s eyeline: GUILT. He then dashes off a prescription for “a very cool new drug” that must be taken with water. Or else.
“Beau Is Afraid” swims in the fluids of guilt and humiliation, from front to back. Beau lives in a grubby apartment located in what looks like a nightmarish New York City, street crime running rampant, killers on the loose, trash and bad vibes everywhere.
How Beau gets home, eventually, provides the quest in writer-director Ari Aster’s sweatbox of anxieties. It is certainly that: an experience, sometimes unaccountably funny, more often a reiterative thud. Beau goes all over the place and basically nowhere. “Beau Is Afraid,” likewise. I’ll take it over garden-variety mediocrity like “Renfield,” but user results may vary.
The watery leitmotif here visually washes over the picture. From Beau’s recurring memories and dreams of a childhood bathtub incident, to the aquarium in the therapist’s office, to the water Beau must drink with his meds, Aster hammers the idea of Jewish-mother guilt that keeps on giving. Aster begins at the beginning, with lil’ Beau in utero, taking a dangerous amount of time leaving his mother’s womb at the hospital. He’ll pay for that. “What’s wrong?!” is the first sentence we hear, screamed by LuPone in muffled voice-over.
The movie, Aster’s third following the bleakly memorable “Hereditary” (2018) and the bad-relationship corrective “Midsommar” (2019), finds the filmmaker working through a lifetime of Freudian maternal issues. We follow Beau at various stages of his long, forlorn life. In flashbacks, teenage Beau (Armen Nahapetian) and mother Mona (Zoe Lister-Jones) vacation in seaside luxury, where Beau meets the girl of his dreams. Decades later she turns into Parker Posey, and their reunion occasions a sex scene of a lifetime, for better or worse.
On his journey home, a seriously injured Beau (don’t ask) becomes the temporary surrogate son/prisoner of a sweet couple played by Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan. From there, always with the idea of home dangling in front of him, Beau ventures, lost, into a forest where a traveling theater troupe puts on elaborate shows springing, seemingly, straight from our protagonist’s subconscious.
The narrative flow of “Beau Is Afraid” wigs out big-time eventually, with Beau at long last arriving at his destination, only now it’s for a funeral. The movie struggles to resolve its black-comedy impulse with its bloat. Like the far superior Charlie Kaufman debut feature “Synecdoche, New York” (2008), this one marinates in a state of mind, and lets that state dictate everything we see, through Phoenix’s astonished, terrified eyes. It ends in a Kafkaesque (sorry, I put off that adjective as long as I could) courtroom setting, where Richard Kind’s prosecutor makes the argument against Beau in favor of Mona, the unloved, misunderstood mother.
The film sticks to an all too steady beat; it’s the rhythmic opposite of something like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” in other words. Phoenix acts his ass off, often entertainingly, and from the hoariest of ancient dark-comic tactics, Aster pulls off the occasional little miracle here and there, especially when LuPone and Posey are around. LuPone is scaldingly effective in a role that essentially plays for keeps what Elaine May’s hectoring, manipulating mother in the old Nichols and May sketches played for keeps and satiric acumen, in equal measure. Aster, for now, can’t seem to hit two notes at once in his work. But he has the stuff to figure it out, and if this grand, exasperating folly gets him there, it’ll be worth it.
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'BEAU IS AFRAID'
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Rated: R (for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language)
Running time: 2:59
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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