‘Beau Is Afraid’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix Grapples With Mother Issues in Ari Aster’s Bonkers Freudian Freakout – Hollywood Reporter

Taking part in Beau Wassermann, the character who offers Ari Aster’s third function its title, Joaquin Phoenix goes balls to the wall in a efficiency of astonishing depth that holds nothing again. Beau lives subsequent door to a peep present emporium known as Ejectus Erectus, and at one level is knowledgeable by a medic that his abnormally distended testicles are trigger for concern, which is only one of many indications that this man badly must — easy methods to put it delicately? — oh heck, shoot a load.

Three hours that positively put the odd in odyssey, Beau Is Afraid might be stated to undergo from the identical bloat, wandering via weird detours of various effectiveness earlier than arriving at a splendidly overripe operatic climax elevated by Patti LuPone because the Lydia Tár of single moms. However even when its pacing is uneven, this can be a film of undeniably spectacular massive swings.

Of a bit with the diabolically imaginative double-header that thrust Aster onto the map, Hereditary and Midsommar, but in addition a major departure into extra adventurous territory, the brand new movie trades the visceral influence of nerve-shredding horror for maniacal darkish comedy in a incessantly intoxicating whirl of Oedipal angst, paranoia and confusion. It’s the kind of batshit-crazy household affair that solely a director with established auteur credentials might get made, which explains why Aster tackled it now regardless that the unique script predates his earlier options.

It begins out paying homage to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours earlier than shifting into Charlie Kaufman mode with a liberal splash or two of Cronenbergian grotesquerie.

However even with an enormous monster subtly instructed early on by one of many marketed points of interest at Ejectus Erectus, Beau Is Afraid occupies extra of a head house than its gut-churning predecessors within the already formidable Aster canon. It’s fueled extra by anxiousness than terrifying dread, which can mood its enchantment to hardcore horror customers. However as a journey into outré extra that’s totally on model for A24, it calls for to be seen.

The tortured mother-son dynamic that drives the picaresque plot is established proper up entrance, opening in darkness with the sound of a heartbeat, intermittent bursts of sunshine and the shrieks of a lady fearing the worst for her freshly delivered child, till a smack on the bum reveals a wholesome, bawling boy. It units the movie’s tone of off-kilter humor and makes way more playful use of a simulated womb-cam than Andrew Dominik’s Blonde.

Lower to 40ish years later and Phoenix’s Beau — paunchy, balding, and so mired in distress he usually appears borderline catatonic — is seeing his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson). The rattled look on Beau’s face when a missed name and voicemail from Mother present up on his cellphone leaves little question as to the primary topic of their periods. However when his shrink asks how he’s feeling about an upcoming go to to his mom on the anniversary of his father’s loss of life, Beau principally simply mumbles incoherently. That no less than scores him new meds.

In one of the vital virtuoso segments, shot by Aster’s common DP Pawel Pogorzelski as a dizzying monitoring sequence via streets seething with chaos and violence, Beau weaves his means again to his grungy condo block in an unnamed metropolis. Gun stalls sit alongside tchotchke stands and meals vans; locals dance, scream and struggle, whereas information studies warn of a psychotic vagrant roaming the streets bare and stabbing random strangers.

Issues are not any much less calm inside Beau’s condo, the place an indication on the door informs tenants of an infestation of brown recluse spiders. More and more hostile notes are shoved below his door from an irate neighbor demanding that he flip down his music, regardless that it’s coming from a special condo. However that friction maybe explains why his keys and baggage are stolen on the doorstep as he’s getting ready to depart for the airport.

The awkward cellphone dialog when Beau calls his mom, Mona, to inform her of the hitch is only a style of the strained rapport between them (evident additionally in flashbacks, with the youthful Mona performed by Zoe Lister-Jones and 13-year-old Beau by Armen Nahapetian). LuPone’s flat responses are punctuated by deafening silences, making it clear Mona believes Beau is simply fabricating an excuse to not go to.

The film chronicles the dogged willpower of this damaged man — whose grownup life seems to have been one lengthy trembling retreat — to show his mom mistaken. He battles towards exterior forces in addition to these in his addled thoughts, which in Kaufmanesque trend could all be a part of the identical factor.

One of many wildest obstacles happens the primary night time, when he’s shut out of his condo and watches from a horrified distance as a rowdy mob occupies and trashes the place. Even when he reclaims possession and makes an attempt to destress in a heat tub, hazard stays, forcing him again out onto the streets and right into a life-threatening accident.

From the hellish metropolis, the movie shifts to seemingly tranquil suburbia, the place Beau will get a quick style of what life in a loving household may really feel like as he’s cared for by surgeon Roger (Nathan Lane) and his compassionate spouse Grace (Amy Ryan). He turns into a surrogate son to the couple, whose personal son was killed in motion and whose teenage daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers) is a risky pillhead. Roger agrees to drive Beau to his mom’s place, however that promise, like Beau’s sanctuary, is short-lived, not least due to a PTSD-afflicted struggle veteran, Jeeves (Denis Ménochet), dwelling in a trailer within the couple’s yard.

The setting shifts once more and will get even trippier as Beau flees via the woods and stumbles upon a hippy-dippy forest theater troupe rehearsing a play. He’s invited to hitch them for the efficiency, which yields the film’s most mesmerizing sequence. Concurrently discovering and dropping himself within the motion onstage, Beau wanders via an alternate actuality, a household lifetime of joys and heartbreaks which may have been his, rendered in exquisitely dreamlike animation by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, the creative Chilean craftsmen behind The Wolf Home.

Impolite actuality — or irreality? — breaks the spell once more, however Beau one way or the other escapes recent threats towards his life and lands again on the palatial house of his mom within the city that bears the titan of business’s title, Wasserton.

In a film full of meticulous design particulars, all of that are there for a purpose, the home is an architectural marvel no much less putting than Aster’s units for Hereditary, its partitions a shrine to Mona’s love for her solely son. Beau’s craving to imagine in that love is amusingly underscored by the 1972 soft-rock nugget “All the things I Personal,” by Bread.

However maternal love is much extra sophisticated than any sappy pop music. The road between sacrifice and suffocation is a skinny one, as is the road separating filial devotion from festering guilt. The much less you understand about this exhilaratingly crazy ultimate stretch the higher, past that it incorporates outlandish revelations, foreshadowed all through, about Beau’s father. Oh, and in addition one of the vital gonzo intercourse scenes in current reminiscence, set to Mariah Carey’s “All the time Be My Child.”

The part additionally options fabulous performances, fearlessly consistent with Aster’s nightmarish imaginative and prescient — by Parker Posey as an worker of Mona’s who’s additionally the childhood sweetheart of Beau’s abortive cruise-ship romance; Richard Form as Mona’s lawyer, who veers from thundering disapproval to damning judgment; and most of all, LuPone in all her magnificent, scenery-chomping glory.

With a mouth made for sneering and a voice made for withering disdain, Mona units Beau straight on the stringent phrases of her extremely conditional love and the methods during which he has failed her by rejecting these phrases. It’s a show of Jewish maternal monstrosity for the ages.

The film is ingeniously solid, with each efficiency discovering its personal idiosyncratic groove whereas additionally cohering to suit throughout the similar unhinged universe of a thoughts in deep misery. That features droll work from Lane, Ryan and Henderson specifically, whereas Nahapetian captures the incapacitating concern of a child effectively on his option to being a basket-case grownup, and Lister-Jones is hilarious because the controlling mom, injecting creepily sexual undertones into traces like, “I’m happy with the person you might be.”

But it surely’s Phoenix who retains you glued even via the movie’s generally difficult longueurs, in a efficiency as absolutely, insanely dedicated as any he’s ever given. If the character invitations extra cringing pity than emotional funding, that’s extra to do with the distancing impact of Aster’s surreal method than something missing in Phoenix’s uncooked, gaping wound of a characterization. When you’ve got mom points, watching Beau’s Homeric humiliation will set off them.

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