Toni Collette deserved an Oscar nomination for her work in Hereditary – I will take every opportunity to spit that fact. And, I’ll admit, I didn’t completely gel with Midsommar the first time I saw it, but the level of detail put into that creepy cult was always there to be admired. In my mind, there are four directors – Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Robert Eggars, and Alex Garland – all competing for the title of the biggest whiz-kid in horror, and what do the other three contestants have in common that Ari Aster does not? The answer – a third entry in their filmography; yet Ari Aster’s third movie is before us today. Oh, I wanted to see this movie in theatres back in April, but in the end, I’m glad I chickened out, because if my reaction is to be anything like what it was for Hereditary, it’ll be borderline catastrophic – I know, it’s the easiest joke to make, but it won’t just be Beau who’s afraid 😮
On a planned trip back home to visit his mother, everything goes horribly wrong for Beau (Joaquin Pheonix). He has his keys stolen from his apartment door and he must make that dreaded call to tell mother that he’ll probably miss his flight while he organises a locksmith, and she doesn’t take it well. From there, I mean, you name it… Beau has recently been prescribed a new anti-anxiety medication that MUST be taken with water, so when he doesn’t strictly follow the rules, there’s a theory that most of what is occurring could be happening in Beau’s head… except for when it isn’t. If not, then Beau is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day that would make Alexander blush that they ever bothered to make a movie about his 😲
Any danger of this movie making sense? 🤣 On the surface, it seems to me that Beau Is Afraid is making comment in the background on mental illness, homelessness, crime, veteran care, and overmedicating, but it treats it all in such a superficial and flippantly artsy way. Let me explain Beau is Afraid this way – Synecdoche, New York was a high-concept movie that the famed film critic Roger Ebert thought was one of the best movies he’d ever seen, and I’d be lying if I said I completely understood it. Then, I’ve heard Mother!, by Darren Aronofsky, criticised for being too obvious in its filmic coding, but I can tell you there were a few people in my screening back in the day that still didn’t get it. This leads me to conclude that these types of movies are exactly what they mean to be – they will be casual to some, and brain-busters to others. Yet, how can one tell if a movie is even good or not if one doesn’t understand it? A movie can aim to be high-concept and still fail in execution, theoretically. Moreover, it is possible to make a high-concept movie that doesn’t end up alienating most of its audience. I’m Thinking of Ending Things, another movie by Charlie Kaufman, is a mystery, but extremely engaging the whole time. Beau Is Afraid is not quite that. It’s not bad – it’s quite breezy once you make peace with not knowing what the hell is going on. But it can also be viewed as 3 hours of pure nonsense. It’s like Ari Aster has put all his ideas for a ‘Twilight Zone series in a melting pot, and allowed Beau to run through it, like Brad Pitt in World War Z. I’m sure it’s all supposed to mean something, and something grander, but if it’s inaccessible, then we have an awkward situation on our hands. And just like Midsommar, my opinion and grasp on this movie may change over time (and I hope it does), but with my freshest take and otherwise, Ari Aster has created another well-made eerie movie, but too far towards circling the realm of nothingness. At least, positively, you never can tell what Aster is going to do next!
Okay, so I sat there patiently, and I had my fingers crossed that the last half-hour might give me some theory to put into writing. In the end, we’re hardly dealing with Denis Villeneuve’s huge spider of Enemy, but we do find out that Beau’s father was a huge dick, and Beau’s mother, Mona (Patti LuPone) is even more clawing and manipulative than we may’ve inferred. Beau is Afraid actually reuses a lot of motifs I’d recognise from Hereditary, for mine – double-agent, the therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), is last seen grinning round the house like a madman, but he doesn’t terrify me the same as that gold guy at the end of Hereditary because I’ve seen it before, and Stephen McKinley Henderson seems lovely. Beau also gets to discover what sick schemes his mother has been conducting, while Toni Collette’s character in Hereditary deduces and is left wondering her mother’s motivations, and will never find out. There’s also the attic, that looms as the unholy place with answers. Watching this movie, I was forced to ask myself, is Aster okay? Two movies out of three have contained domineering mother figures as the path to all evil, and where I feel a little differently about Beau Is Afraid is that this rendition just seems mean. Beau lacks agency throughout the whole movie, and it’s just really frustrating – if only he told Toni (Kylie Rogers) that it wasn’t his call to sleep in her room and went about his day without feeling guilty, or he told Roger (Nathan Lane) that he’d find his own way to his mother’s funeral if surgeries had come up. But Beau is ‘incriminating himself’, and it’s important to the overall concept that Beau is a complete coward; probably, maybe… I’m still half-guessing. Joaquin Pheonix must’ve had some resentment leftover in the tank from his performance in Joker to put his name to this one and hate a whole new mother – Beau’s rundown apartment building at the start is very similar to Joker too. Beau’s final journey ends in a stadium, perhaps an abstraction of guilt, as if it were the ‘house of Sith’ at the end of Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker. Or, possibly, he’s being watched and judged, like we watch in the cinema, and like the Romans watched their artisans die in the Colosseum; as a writer, and filmmaker, is genuinely coming to terms with his personal parental trauma, for our amusement.
I do think I figured something out – adult Beau is about to have a bath while the most nervous of the homeless hovers above on the roof with a spider on his hand. Going by what the spider represented in Enemy, could this be an echo of Beau’s childhood memory, where Beau knows that his most nervous fears linger similarly in the attic at home…? But that’s just what I’ve got for one of this movie’s metaphors; only 40+ more to go! And now, we are closing in on the time where I stop writing, and look up what others are theorising about Beau Is Afraid for myself; then, either feel silly for not completely understanding it, or frustrated that it’s still not satisfying to me 😑 Would I recommend Beau Is Afraid to other people? Well, it is rather well made, and maybe you can be the one to tell me what it all means. My favourite parts were the notes under the door when the “music was too loud” (which never went anywhere, as far as I can tell), and Parker Posey – she’s still got it. But also, any movie that features Vanessa Amorosi’s ‘Shine’ is alright with me.
2.5
Leave a Reply