Beau knows psychodrama.
Director Ari Aster's "Beau Is Afraid," for all its baffling, boffo, audacious, disturbing, tortured, ambitious, demented, confounding, hilarious and sublimely uncomfortable imagery, is ultimately a thin character study of its slumped-shouldered protagonist and his guilt-laden relationship with his domineering mother.
But Aster's deliriously bonkers vision and his sheer willingness to go there, wherever exactly there might be, make it an admirably dumbfounding journey. This much is certain: There is currently no other movie like it, there hasn't been a movie like it for a long time and there's not likely to be another movie like it for a long time to come.
Put it in the pile with "Babylon," another recent work of grand ambition by a young-ish director putting it all on the line, going for broke. Are these the last days of disco for unabashedly artistic filmmakers not working in the superhero genre who still have something to say and want to say it in as big and as widescreen a way as possible? That's how the 36-year-old Aster treats "Beau," his third film, and it's how 38-year-old Damien Chazelle approached his fourth film "Babylon," his end-of-2022 old Hollywood epic.
Plot- or story-wise, the two films don't have anything in common. But as Hollywood's business model has shifted and the pandemic swallowed whole the business prospects of adult-driven, arthouse-minded, non-superhero fare, both "Beau Is Afraid" and "Babylon" pulsate with wild, swing-for-the-fences, I'm-going-to-make-this-while-I-still-have-the-chance energy. Aster and Chazelle are playing with house money while there's still house money to play with.
Commercially, "Babylon" tanked, and "Beau Is Afraid" isn't likely to fare much better with paying crowds, who are likely to find it, best case scenario, er, deeply divisive. But in terms of long plays, both films succeed, and are likely to play to cult crowds and film scholars for the foreseeable future. They win.
"Beau Is Afraid" is a paranoid, delusional, psychosexual freakout that earns its place in the hall of fame of mommy issues movies; play it in a marathon with "Psycho," "Carrie," "Mommie Dearest" and "Only God Forgives" for the worst Mother's Day ever. Over the course of its three-hour runtime, it unfolds in four distinct chapters, each different and tone and jarringly surreal in their own way, none tethered to any remotely identifiable version of reality.
Joaquin Phoenix cements his reputation as our most adventurous modern leading man in the title role of Beau Wassermann, an indecisive, emotionally stunted middle-aged cipher who lives beneath the shoe of his emotionally abusive mother (Broadway legend Patti LuPone, engulfed in flames), no matter how far away from her he is, physically.
Since willingly torching his career with his disastrous 2010 mockmentary "I'm Still Here" and building it back up piece by piece — zig-zagging all over the place with remarkable turns in films like "The Master," "Her," "You Were Never Really Here," "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot," "Joker" and "C'mon C'mon" — Phoenix, 48, has made a convincing argument for himself at the very top of the list of his generation's greatest actors, right next to Leonardo DiCaprio. (The two actors were born two weeks apart in the fall of 1974.) Phoenix is gutsy, fearless and willing to take huge risks, and he walks the plank here with Aster, both boldly placing one foot in front of the other.
After a scene setter that opens with nothing less than the lead character's POV of his own birth — just so you know the kind of ride you're in for — "Beau Is Afraid" kicks off in the sort of nightmare urban hellscape your mother warned you about, an apocalyptic vision of a world gone completely mad.
Beau lives alone in a barely furnished second-story apartment, while on the city street below dead bodies lay unattended on the sidewalk, naked men wield knives and a serial killer dubbed Birthday Boy Stab Man is on the loose. Beau is, understandably, afraid to even leave his front door, and does so only to visit his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who prescribes him meds to even his moods. But Beau has a trip coming up to fly out and visit his dear old mom.
On his way to catch his plane, everything that can go wrong does — Aster really ratchets up the possibilities of what can go wrong to poor Beau — and not only does Beau miss his flight, he finds out something terrible has happened to his mother. In his heightened state to leave his apartment and get to her, Beau winds up naked, attacked in the street and hit by a vehicle, and wakes up in a suburban home under the care of Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (a perfectly deployed Nathan Lane), a couple that appears to be kind but are hiding menacing intentions beneath the surface. (Their teenage daughter Toni, played by "Yellowstone's" Kylie Rogers, is much more upfront about her malice.)
Beau's odyssey only gets stranger from there, as Aster sets in motion a fever dream of hallucinations, flashbacks and future visions that touch on everything from mass shootings to woodland fairies to the mid-1990s daydream pop of Mariah Carey. (You'll never hear "Always Be My Baby" the same again.) How much any of this is meant to be taken at face value is up for debate, and Charlie Kaufman is a clear signpost.
Aster is working squarely in the realm of pitch-black comedy, but there are parallels to his previous horror outings "Hereditary" and "Midsommar," and he remains eerily obsessed with the notion of mangled heads and decapitations as devices to move the plot forward.
Is Aster — who shows his adoration for Broadway in the casting of LuPone, Lane and Richard Kind, who pops up in a small role late in the film — working out his own mommy issues, or is he merely using the idea of mommy issues as a means of storytelling on which to hang his main character? That's for him and his therapist to work out. But as a character, Beau Is limited, and seems to only exist for his mother and for Aster to push around in equal measure, which often makes the movie feel like a form of torture, and not always the one intended.
Still, Aster crafts a first-rate brainscrabble, a movie that's daring and daffy in equal measure, an argument in favor of giving filmmakers the tools they need to tell the stories they want to tell. (See also Darren Aronofsky's 2017 "Mother!" another visionary head trip that was greeted about as warmly as a spider in a bowl of soup.) "Beau Is Afraid" is challenging, yes, but its reward is the way it uses art as a lightning rod. Love it or hate it, you're not going to forget it.
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'BEAU IS AFRAID'
Grade: B
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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