Based on the evidence presented in his first two features, Hereditary and Midsommar, it is more than apparent that filmmaker Ari Aster is not afraid of making films that are destined to divide audiences between those who find his bizarre narratives to be formally and dramatically audacious works worthy of note and attention and those who find them to be overlong, mostly ludicrous and often grotesquely violent shaggy dog tales that are just pretentious enough to seem as if they are deeper and more profound than they actually are. And yet, even those films feel like focus-group-driven crowd-pleasers when compared to his latest work, Beau Is Afraid. Here is a film that begins within the brith canal as its central character makes his debut into the world and then puts him on an often-hallucinatory journey that consumes three full hours of screen time before landing on a final note that seems designed specifically to alienate anyone who has stuck it out up til then. It has moments of sheer brilliance and lord knows it is certainly audacious, but is it any good? Not particularly, though it does contain some moments and elements that are so funny, thrilling and unique that you may find yourself willing to forgive the lesser parts, at least up to a point.
Following that natal prologue, we jump ahead about 50 years or so to see what became of that infant and it isn’t pretty. He is Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a balding, anxiety-prone nebbish who lives in near-squalor in a crummy apartment in an unnamed urban hellhole that is essentially what Republican pundits would like you to believe is everyday life in places like New York or Chicago—outdoor markets sell automatic rifles, a naked serial killer is rampaging through the area stabbing people in the neck and when Beau, who has just had his keys stolen, props open the door to his building to run across the street to buy a bottle of water, he watches helplessly as seemingly the entire neighborhood files inside and takes over his place.
And yet, as terrifying as these things may be, they are nothing compared to what appears to be the biggest source of anxiety in his life—his mother, Mona Wasserman (Patti LuPone), who has clearly inspired him to succumb to a lifelong sense of Oedipal angst neuroses that not even the countless medications prescribed by his well-meaning therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) can quite quell. Despite this, he is still planning to make a trip to visit her for her birthday, the first time he has seen her in about six months, but when a weird chain of circumstances (the only kind that exists in this film) causes him to miss his flight, the chilly sense of disdain that she levels at him over the phone for what she insists is another case of him trying to embarrass her all but levels him to the ground.
As anyone who has seen either of Aster’s films knows, his narratives don’t really begin in earnest until the onset of a grave family tragedy and that is the case here. Beau receives some monstrously bad news over the phone and it finally compels him to make the trip to see his mother despite his already-building sense of anxiety and despite the fact that he is unable to book a plane ticket. The journey, as you can probably surmise, turns into an increasingly surreal trek that appears to be filled with enough perils along the way to make the Lord of the Rings saga seem like a walk in the park.
There is an encounter with Roger and Grace (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), a seemingly perfect suburban couple who take Beau in for a while following an incident, much to the annoyance of their daughter, Toni (Kylie Rogers), who already resents her parents for ignoring her to focus on her killed-in-combat brother and is especially pissed that they have give her room to some stranger. After being forced to hit the road again, he is taken in by Penelope (Hayley Squires), who is part of an itinerant theatrical troupe that has set up shop in the woods and who put on a show that has particular resonance for Beau and his complications. There are also the occasional flashbacks to earlier points in Beau’s life (or additional hallucinations), the key one involving a cruise he took with his mother in which he instantly falls for a girl on the boat (Julia Antonelli) and is tucked in by his mother (played in her younger years by Zoe Lister-Jones), who tells him a grotesque story that covers his conception, the passing of the father that he never knew and the hereditary medical condition that will put a major crimp on his sex life in the decades to come. Whether he arrives at his final destination, I leave for you to discover except to note that he ultimately is forced to come to terms with his mother and his extremely complicated feelings towards her and has an unexpected encounter with another woman from his past (Parker Posey).
Needless to say, Beau Is Afraid is a lot to take in and even at three full hours, it still feels wildly overstuffed with ideas, images and diversions, making it feel at times like the longest and oftentimes cruelest shaggy dog joke in the whole of cinema history. As Beau continues on his seemingly never-ending quest, we delve further into his subconscious in scenes that run the gamut from absurdist humor to grotesque horror (albeit of a more psychological nature than what Aster has demonstrated in his previous films) and there is perhaps not a single moment on display where anyone could possibly predict what might happen within the next five minutes. Unless things get unexpectedly weird in the next few months, I doubt that another film—certainly not one on this level of production—will come along this year that even approaches the oddness on display here. Although comparisons will no doubt be made to the films of Charlie Kaufman, the film that I was most reminded of was Darren Aronofsky’s bizarro religious metaphor mother and even that crazy-ass, baby-eating spectacle seems almost staid in comparison to this.
And yet, despite my admiration for Aster’s audacity in dreaming up such a thing in the first place and for A24’s willingness to fund such a commercially chancy project, I constantly found myself being kept at a strange distance by the material that prevented me from fully getting into it. At first, I thought that maybe it was because I somehow managed to get through my life without having any great psychological issues regarding my relationship with my own mother. However, upon reflection, it seems to me that there is more to my alienation from the material than that. Although the film ostensibly promises to take us on a tour of our hero’s tortured psyche, Aster too often ducks the potentially rich psychological nuances of the story and goes instead for (un)easy laughs and as a result, it all becomes a little silly after a while. This becomes especially troublesome towards the end, when the film is theoretically reaching to its big emotional and psychological climax but it is still throwing weirdo jokes into the mix, perhaps in an effort to distract viewers from noticing that the story ultimately proves to have strange similarities to the great Pink Floyd: The Wall, albeit without that film’s sense of whimsy and poppy soundtrack.
The absurdly over-scaled size of the production also winds up working against it after a while. At first, the immensity of it all is undeniably impressive—it feels at times as if Aster saw the seemingly endless theatrical production that Philip Seymour Hoffman was creating at the center of Synecdoche, New York and decided to go several steps further—but after a while, the incredible scale of the production begins to clash with the comparatively underdeveloped central character and there are many times in which I found myself more intrigued in the production design than in the misadventures of Beau. Part of this is due to the problem that the film is based around a performance from Joaquin Phoenix that just doesn’t quite click—normally one of our most inventive actors, he mostly coasts through the proceedings in a vaguely zonked-out manner that is entertaining enough on the surface but doesn’t dig much deeper than that. It is ultimately a one-note turn and while there are moments where that note proves to be the exact correct one, it eventually becomes a bit monotonous. (If you’ve seen the film’s poster, you have essentially seen his performance.)
What makes Beau Is Afraid so frustrating, not to mention so difficult to simply dismiss, is the fact that there are a number of elements that are genuinely brilliant. The opening section observing Beau in his nightmarish circumstances is a hilarious and hallucinatory satire along the lines of Little Murders and After Hours that scores some big laughs while also effectively getting us into the peculiar mindset of the character. While I have some misgivings regarding the film’s final section—I just don’t think that it pulls everything together as effectively as Aster thinks it does and I think the bleak final punchline falls flat—but the moments between Phoenix and Posey are effective and build to a sick punchline that actually does work and also ensures, once seen, that you will never be able to listen to Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” with a straight face again. The high point, however, comes roughly midway through the film during Beau’s respite with the theater troupe in the woods, where we see them performing a play that serves as a meta-commentary on his life and journey utilizing any number of wild stylistic tricks along the way. This is a long sequence, to be sure, and one that probably sounds more than a little pretentious in my description but it is absolutely spellbinding to watch—it is easily the most stylistically graceful and genuinely emotional stretch of filmmaking that Aster has accomplished to date and when it finally comes to its conclusion, the rest of the film never quite manages to find its footing again.
There are a number of other things to admire about Beau Is Afraid—a quirky visual here, a loopy line of dialogue there—but just not enough of them to make it feel like anything other than a final clearing house for the parental issues that have been a key element of Aster’s features to date. And yet, while I don’t feel that he has ultimately connected with the material as well as he thinks he has, I do have admiration for his willingness to use the goodwill that he has generated over the course of his previous films to swing for the fences as wildly as he does here. Is it self-indulgent? Of course it is but then again, most art is self-indulgent to some degree or another and at least in this case, the self-indulgence takes the form of someone trying to do something unique and personal instead of churning out another noisily forgettable would-be blockbuster that exists for no other reason than to make lots of money. I may not care for it that much but my guess is that others will and maybe some of those people will use its example as an inspiration to tell their own stories in an equally audacious manner, though hopefully one that is ultimately more coherent and satisfying.