Still more bad news arrives in shocking fashion, and soon Beau must return home no matter what. But his quest to get back to the house he grew up in is beset by many obstacles, starting with the wealthy suburban couple, Roger and Grace (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), who insist on taking care of Beau after creaming him with their car.
And so it goes. Beau must endure an episodic series of adventures, disasters, and nightmares, all while Beau Is Afraid becomes increasingly more surreal. Unfortunately, as Beau’s issues with his mother (icily played in younger and older versions by Zoe Lister-Jones and the legendary Patti LuPone) come to the forefront, the viewer begins to feel more and more distant from it. It doesn’t help that Phoenix’s performance, while clearly another physical and psychological marathon for this immensely talented actor, is alienating from the start. We can’t find a way to empathize with Beau because his circumstances from the start are so heightened in their misery and dislocation while his reactions are either passive or hysterical.
In the end, despite a top-notch cast (including Parker Posey as a childhood flame of Beau’s who briefly comes back into his life), a handful of both genuinely creepy and funny moments, and a stunningly beautiful animated sequence courtesy of The Wolf House writers-directors Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, Beau Is Afraid is a slog. It’s an ambitious one, novelistic and grand in intent, but taking three hours to essentially deal with a dance of guilt and emotional abuse between mother and son, with an increasingly enigmatic narrative that offers nothing but destruction, proves too unwieldy.
That’s a shame, because Aster clearly has bigger aims that he just can’t articulate here. Hereditary dealt with family, and specifically mother, issues in much more compact and eerie fashion, giving a traditional tale about the sins of our ancestors a visceral and psychological edge, while Midsommar was a bit more confused yet still effectively transmitted its theme of a woman overcoming trauma through an extreme form of spiritual catharsis.
Beau Is Afraid takes the worst aspects of the latter film—a muddling of theme and tone—and applies it to a four-part structure in which each section almost represents a different genre entirely, but has nothing under the surface to power it along. In the end, it’s not even clear what Beau is afraid of, but this exhausting, punishing movie doesn’t give us enough to truly feel for him.
A24 releases Beau Is Afraid in U.S. theaters on April 21.
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue8Snq56qpJa2r7nEp6toop%2BWvra1zWanoaeVo7a5ecmooKerXZeyosGMoqpmmZanrqqwjJyYrKxdlsFuuticZKybopqyr7XNoGSwmaSYtW7Ax55kp52nYsGzrcilnKtlkaLGbr7YmqVmmaKeeqK%2F056pZpmiorKvec2an5qolam2orqMm5yarV2ewG6txauYopxdn7yivdSipWaomKSyr7XXZqGupJmWeqK606ilnqScnnw%3D