There are some movies that are so deeply personal to the filmmaker as to almost defy criticism or even really in-depth deconstruction. When you watch something like Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, N.Y.” or Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!,” there are so many different interpretations left on the table that the viewer is invited to take from the film whatever they want or need from their consumption of art. Show 10 people “2001: A Space Odyssey” and you’ll get 10 completely different interpretations for what the space baby means.
Ari Aster’s “Beau is Afraid” is one of those movies that defies deconstruction, although I’d say it’s not quite as coherent as the other films mentioned. Aster’s debut, “Hereditary” is still argu-ably in the top two or three scariest horror movies of the century so far, with his sophomore feature, “Midsommar” being a giant step forward for him in the formalism and craft of filmmaking. With “Beau,” he’s made a movie that is not only wildly more ambitious than his first two films, but also sloppier and less satisfying as a whole.
While there are moments throughout “Beau” that contain the strongest filmmaking of his career, those moments don’t necessarily fully cohere into a satisfying whole that will leave audiences happy they went along for the 181-minute ride.
That also might actually be the entire point of the film, which is an insanely fearless way to create art, three features into a career. Ultimately, if I had to boil down the movie into a logline, it would be that “Beau is Afraid” follows an anxiety-riddled man named Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), who must leave his cartoonishly violent neighborhood (in the way you see the less reputable news magazines fear-monger about cities like Portland and New York) to go visit his mother in a town several hours away. He is very afraid to do so. Just crossing the street to a bodega is life-threatening for Beau.
The three-hour runtime is dedicated to Beau’s episodic odyssey through a world that barely resembles our own. Instead, it resembles something closer to what your small-town relative imagines the world is like from checking the NextDoor app every day. Because the entire film is from Beau’s perspective, we are living in his anxiety and neurosis in real time. Every scene in the movie plays like a nightmare you have after getting crossfaded at a stranger’s house, so you wake up in somewhere you can’t recognize, feeling lost and alone. Beau’s journey is such a large portion of the film that the destination cannot possibly be as satisfying as the trip. And, my god, what a trip. A subtitle for the film could have been “Fear and Self-Loathing in America.”
I don’t think it’s too much to say that Joaquin Phoenix is currently our finest working actor and his performance as Beau cements him as the most fearless performer on the planet. Watch him in this, “You Were Never Really Here,” “Joker” and “The Master” and you’ll literally see four completely different human beings existing in real time. Without Phoenix’s dedication, “Beau” wouldn’t work at all, but because he literally bares his soul in every frame, even as the plot gets more surreal and outlandish, we’re still connected emotionally to the story.
I was hoping that the film’s strangeness would eventually come together in a satisfying and cathartic conclusion, but my hopes didn’t matter in the face of Aster’s ambition. This is his Homer-ic journey through maternal guilt; his Freudian deconstruction of childhood; his humiliation regarding his virginal sexual feelings and the deep-seated fears those engendered; his self-flagellation as he carries the weight of his own fears and judges whether pharmaceuticals are helping; his meta-textual deep dive into the language of cinema and the fundamental basics of storytelling. Maybe it’s none of those things. Or all of those things.
I found myself walking out of “Beau is Afraid” disappointed that it didn’t come together in the way that I wanted, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Aster’s vision is so singular and personal that the fact that none of it went how I expected is even more impresssive. Not all of it works and I’m sure a large chunk of the second hour could have been cut and it wouldn’t have changed a thing, but I’m also glad that’s not what we got. Something this big, ambitious and flawed could have only come from Aster and his fearless anxiety. Maybe that’s an oxymoron, but sometimes so is life.
coming to Tin Pan Theater 5/12
This article appears in Source Weekly May 4, 2023.
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