Over at Reverse Shot, during a candid and illuminating chat about his latest, Beau is Afraid, Ari Aster tells Michael Koresky about his fastidious approach to production design. Several of the film’s locations were built on a stage, and countless little details—“every poster, every sign, every product”—were created from scratch. Aster cites his obsession for such persnickety world-building as one reason the film was eventually converted to IMAX. Only a wider aspect ratio can do justice to all of the sight gags he’s disseminated over Beau’s three-hour sprawl; the format “encourages the viewer to search the frame,” and “promotes a different kind of engagement with the film.” He goes on to add:
There’s this thing that in comics is called “chicken fat,” which are just the details that litter a frame. I got that term from Dan Clowes. I did not know it beforehand, but I’ve been obsessed with it since. I love “chicken fat,” and the reason I love that is because I feel that as a viewer, when you start noticing those details and the love and attention that went into those details, you start to feel respected. And when you feel respected as a spectator, you start to respect what you’re watching. I feel that so much of what I watch just feels so arbitrary. And I really resent that in art, the feeling of something being arbitrary.
I wondered about “chicken fat” all through Beau Is Afraid—more specifically, if there was a chasm between Aster’s fussy attention to the film’s surfaces and the conspicuously empty inner life of its hangdog protagonist. In Beau Is Afraid, the titular Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) is a paragon of angst-fueled passivity. True to the film’s title, middle-aged Beau is scared of many things—gorgeous women, bloodthirsty men, drugs, death, orgasms—none of which are more terrifying than his domineering mother (Patti LuPone). The film tails him as he crosses the country to attend her funeral, an odyssey that catapults him from his dank apartment in an ultraviolent, Gotham City–like metropolis to a suburban asylum, a magical forest, and beyond, all while suffering all kinds of psychological and physical abuse. “Guilt, shame, paranoia, Freudian mom issues–you name it, Aster slaps it up there on the screen,” Stephanie Zacharek notes at TIME, “with Phoenix as our jittery naif, stumbling from one traumatic episode to the next,” in what amounts to “the most magnificent act of oversharing you’ll see all year, a banquet of all the TMI you can eat, just for the price of a ticket.”
But for a film that unfolds as a protracted therapy session, Beau remains curiously void, more cipher than full-fledged character. What he does for a living and how he spends his time, not to mention why and how his mother has managed to deprive him of any basic fulfillment for all these years, are questions the film isn’t interested in answering. “Aster can’t be bothered to work it out,” Richard Brody astutely observes at the New Yorker, “or, rather the film depends on this blankness, on letting viewers know almost nothing about what Beau knows about himself and about his mother.” To set up the film’s “cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.” For all of the fantasy elements surfacing throughout Beau Is Afraid, “the movie isn’t a work of Surrealism but merely of unrealism.”
The difference is that a work of Surrealism gets at what’s hidden in ordinary life. Aster’s unrealism does exactly the opposite: it conceals and obscures what’s substantial in Beau’s ordinary life. A depiction of Beau’s undramatic experiences on the day before the story begins would reveal far more about his character—and about the world—than does the elaborate contrivance of which the film is actually made. But Aster is either unwilling or unable to conjure such practical, humble, but significant doings. “Beau Is Afraid” shares a crucial trait with another recent cinematic stacked-deck contrivance, “Tár”: it shows only what fits the outcome, not what’s important about the character. “Beau Is Afraid” launches into Beau’s dreams and hallucinations, which is to say into his fantasy inner life, without touching on his far more complex, if less sensationalistic, realistic inner life—namely, his memories, his knowledge about himself, what he has done, how he has lived, the network of plain but vastly important events on which the entire dramatic fiction depends.
Put otherwise, Aster seems far less interested in his protagonist than in the torturous journey he’s laid out for him. That may be part of his overall design. Far from inviting one to side with Beau, the film seems to question that very impulse, and to complain that Beau Is Afraid makes it hard to empathize with its titular hero might be to play into Aster’s hands. Even so, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that Phoenix’s drifter stands for little more than an empty vessel, a man-child unable to elicit much curiosity, let alone empathy. “Beau Is Afraid has been built for maximum admiration,” Manohla Dargis contends at the New York Times, “and certainly there’s much to respect about Aster’s filmmaking and how he coordinates the movie’s many fast-whirring parts to make another horror show with inner and outer head trauma.”
Yet despite these attractions and in spite of Phoenix’s aura and his focus—and how he plays with the character, opening Beau up a wee bit with flickers of yearning and teasingly humanizing fissures—it is tough to care about a mouse who matters so much less to the filmmaker than the shiny mousetrap where he’s imprisoned you both.
And it is especially difficult when the journey itself becomes so bloated and reiterative. “Aster’s past films have their own punishing qualities, but Beau is a new test of patience and endurance,” Richard Lawson argues at Vanity Fair; “if this film is an act of talk therapy, it’s a scream session, more digressive rant than breakthrough.” With its tonal hopscotching and various locales, the film conjures an arguably more ambitious spectacle than Aster’s earlier projects, Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). Still, while Beau Is Afraid is never boring, it “still manages to be tedious,” per the Austin Chronicle’s Richard Whittaker. “It’s endlessly inventive, but lacks the narrative or conceptual discipline to turn those inventions into something functional,” with its “wild tonal shifts leading to a certain incoherence.”
More troubling still, as Hannah Strong aptly suggests over at Little White Lies, Beau’s journey “is entirely literal,” and Phoenix’s near-catatonic schlub “remains as he is when we first meet him.”
After three hours, we are very much in the same place as we were when the film started. This is a road movie that quickly seems to run out of road, ambling erratically down a dirt path to nowhere until coming to an abrupt, unsatisfying stop. It’s not an entirely unpleasant journey, but the film does have a jarring, unfinished feel to it, and while the detail-oriented might find it novel to unpack its myriad cinematic homages, and Aster’s ambitious execution is worthy of celebration, ultimately it’s an uneven ride.
Turning Beau’s purgatorial non-movement into a dramatically fascinating journey would be a tough feat for anyone. But whatever the narrative potential of that limbo, Aster squanders it through his mousetrap-like design of the film, and his utter disinterest is fleshing out Beau’s character beyond some surface tics and quirks. All of this reduces Beau Is Afraid to an entirely predetermined ride, in which nothing is left to chance and characters are moved around like pawns in an elaborate game. Admittedly, as Justin Chang warns at the L.A. Times, “Aster has always had a weakness for treating his characters like chess pieces, moving them toward their grim fates with breathtaking, sometimes agonizing deliberation.” But if the approach worked brilliantly in a film like Hereditary, “which turned its protagonist’s dollhouse dioramas into a startling visual conceit and a hell of a satanic metaphor,”
It’s far less effective in an ostensibly more unhinged, unbridled work like “Beau Is Afraid,” where even the most surreal intrusion and the nuttiest non sequitur feels calculated to within an inch of its life. Aster may ultimately be too much the formalist control freak to achieve the crazy, let-it-all-hang-out catharsis he’s chasing, and the elaborate trap he’s engineered for Beau seems to close, finally, on himself. He’s made a guilt trip to nowhere.
Then again, as loopy and calculated as that trip may be, it’s difficult to remain unmoved by the many baroque flourishes that pave it. I certainly wouldn’t go as far as to call Beau Is Afraid “the Citizen Kane of mommy-issues movies,” as David Fear hyperbolically calls it in his Rolling Stone review. Yet the film, to borrow again from Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson, is indeed “full of strange beauty, moments when Aster slows his manic shedding of vanity (and his expression of it) and allows for some poetry.” There’s a “sincere sadness [that] stalks [it],” and “it is hard not to grab onto that, to reach for the frail thing at the center of the film and try to connect.” For all its flaws, this “is big, declarative cinema; irksome (or worse) as some of the film may be, it has a gravitational pull.”
Beau might be terrified of innumerable things, but the film itself isn’t scared of alienating viewers; that readiness, as Adam Nayman argues at The Ringer, might well be its greatest asset, and the source of its originality.
From its daringly abstracted opening frames […] Beau Is Afraid stares down lovers and haters alike with a confidence belied by its gaping sense of insecurity. At once jittery and magisterial, it’s the work of an artist with his game face on, even if he’s also occasionally wiping sweat off his brow. Even more than Hereditary and Midsommar […] Beau has been engineered to make indifference an impossibility. It’s a movie whose flaws are not only at least as interesting as its strengths, but may actually be the better reason to see it. For those who enjoyed (and were unnerved by) the shivery editing rhythms and occasionally appalling money shots of Hereditary and Midsommar, Beau offers more of the same, except unfiltered through genre tropes or clichés. Here, Aster serves his neuroses straight up, and the result is a paradox: a film that’s suggestive or derivative of a dozen other titles yet unfolds as an original vision. It’s a movie that we haven’t seen before.
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