THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. You know, it’s weird: the first thirty-odd minutes of Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid reminded me of the climax to The Matrix Revolutions. That’s the bit where Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss swerve through a city street as malicious bots in human form come hurtling out of windows to annihilate them like pissed-off white blood cells. Beau is Afraid is at its gnarly best when it’s throwing Joaquin Phoenix through a similarly hostile social gauntlet, where a violent, scared, and horny armada of folks make like Caligula and Natural Born Killers in the film’s chaotic, cracked-mirror version of New York City. One of these people is a spree killer called Birthday Boy Stab-Man, whose name is exceedingly accurate.
For these first thirty minutes at least, Beau is Afraid is an effective, if belligerent, MAD Magazine lampoon of social anxiety and media-fed fears about the world. After all, who among us actually enjoys going outside — or dealing with neighbors? Of course, there’s a twist. Because this film, like life, isn’t about any one thing; by the time Beau Isaac Wassermann (Phoenix) finally leaps into the wider (and crazier) world, we’ve already begun to grok it’s not society that’s made Beau so anxious — it’s his mom.
Beau’s traipse through this neurotic hellscape is triggered by the sudden and shocking death of his domineering mother (Patti LuPone in the present, Zoe Lister-Jones in the past). Her lawyer (Richard Kind) tells Beau that the funeral cannot — and will not! — begin until he gets there. Even in death, Beau’s mom still finds new and creative ways to crush him.
As anyone with travel anxiety knows, getting to the airport is a Herculean task. In Beau is Afraid, it’s Sisyphean: Beau has his keys and luggage stolen, his apartment is broken into, and he gets hit by a truck and ostensibly kidnapped by a well-off couple (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane) whose son was killed during a military deployment. The further he goes, the farther he is from where he needs to be. Farther still from whatever remains of his sanity.
Phoenix is a compelling cipher, gawking and sobbing as he shuffles through Aster’s conga line of atrocities. A cipher is about all his character amounts to. Who was Beau before this harrowing journey began? That’s not up for exploration. We discover he’s a virgin at one point — did Beau’s mom remove all possibility of any romance, ever? Not one girlfriend in all his 49 years?
Later, Beau meets a troupe of traveling actors whose play transmogrifies into an animated glimpse into the kind of life Beau might have led free from his mother. It’s a delirious sequence, expertly made, and blunted because we don’t know what kind of life Beau has already led. We know he was born (the blackness and echoing dissonance of this sequence is the first of many perplexing IMAX experiences), he lived, and — well, I won’t spoil it. Just know that the sad man is burdened by his mother from the jump, and remains that way.
Ari Aster has clearly made the beancounters at A24 very happy with the success of Hereditary and Midsommar because his latest is precisely the epic-length oddball feature of Oedipal proportion that might not have been made at this scale — IMAX! — if he hadn’t already set the arthouse on fire. It’s certainly the “one for me” kind of project an auteur would make after such critical and commercial successes. Its Criterion Blu-ray release seems almost preordained.
The thing is, while Beau is Afraid may share the unrestrained, kitchen-sink-and-dick-joke energy of another A24 offering — this is the harder-R nebbish cousin of Everything Everywhere All At Once — it doesn’t share its emotional insight or curiosity. It’s a film dork’s metaphorical and vertiginous view of one man’s life, rife with Bergman references and shot like the Coens and David Lynch teamed up for a truck stop speed bender.
Aster is so pumped that he has the toys to build his magnum opus that, in his creative enthusiasm, he glosses over the interiority that makes Beau tick. Phoenix uses his entire body to convey his mental deterioration and spiritual despair. He’s so good in this. And his director pushes him through the film like an especially stubborn turd, the stuff that made him long since calcified into an undefinable, rock-solid lump of neuroses.
5 out of 10
Beau is Afraid is in limited release now.
Written and directed by Ari Aster.
Produced by Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen.
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Parker Posey.
Cinematography by Pawel Pogorzelski.
Rated R for giant dicks, corpses a-plenty, and one instance of floodgates-opening sex.
More DoomRocket Reviews:
Renfield is comedy-horror that forgets to be funny — or scary
Nefarious is a sermon dressed up as a sub-Blumhouse thriller
Kit + The Wolf is a joyous bootleg riff on Marvel’s Merry Mutants
