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BEAUTIFUL BOY (2018)
Director: Felix Van Groeningen Cast: Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Christian Convery, Oakley Bull, Kaitlyn Dever, Stefanie Scott MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:00 Release Date: 10/12/18 (limited); 10/19/28 (wider); 10/26/18 (wide) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 25, 2018 An admirable but ultimately shallow look at how one young man's drug addiction affects his family, Beautiful Boy avoids just about every cliché. We don't see how the young man gets into drugs. There's no eccentric group of addicts at a rehabilitation facility who teach the young man how to live, and there's no psychiatric doctor who slowly picks away at the 18-year-old's deepest secrets and pain. There's no big speech that sets things right. No, this young man simply becomes addicted to drugs, without his family or even him realizing what's happening. His trips to rehab are not some magical fix, and at a certain point, even the most supportive members of his family have no words remaining to try to help him. The movie comes from a pair of memoirs by father and son David and Nic Sheff. The father wrote the book of the movie's title, discussing how he dealt with the reality of his son's addiction, while the son wrote Tweak about his own experiences being addicted to methamphetamines. The screenplay by Luke Davies and director Felix Van Groeningen leans heavily on the father's story, trapped in a cycle of wanting to help his son and tormented by memories of when things might have gone wrong. There are no simple answers to the son's addiction, though. Looking for them—in memories of the kid's isolation, investment in nihilistic music and literature, repeated travels between his divorced parents, and growing rebellion against his father—might be a distraction from what's right in front of the father. The movie, as one might have gathered by now, follows a straight line in terms of the narrative of the son's addiction, but it constantly veers into various moments from the past. We see David (Steve Carell) in assorted scenes of the bond with his son. Most of them are happy, but all of them are redefined by the knowledge of Nic's (Timothée Chalamet) eventual addiction. Maybe David was too worried about his son before any of this happened. We see him calling out for the teenager in the ocean when the two go surfing, but just as David starts to become genuinely worried, Nic rides into view on a wave without a care in the world. We see the father talk about drugs to his son, and maybe his lecture about the dangers wasn't strong enough. There's a scene of the first time a very young Nic has to travel by plane to visit his mother Vicki (Amy Ryan) for the summer, and perhaps no heartwarming declaration of how much the father loves his son could be enough for the boy, who thought his parents loved each other and are now divorced. One mostly understands what the movie is trying to do with these memories. It's David's way of investigating what might have caused his son's addiction, and it's also his way of clinging to the knowledge that there's more to Nic than his addiction. There's no explicit explanation for any of this. Van Groeningen trusts that the audience will recognize the purpose of these scenes. Much of the movie plays out with a similarly implicit meaning. The biggest impact doesn't come from Nic's attempts at recovery and eventual, repeated relapses. It's in the way the movie simply shows time passing. After a stay in rehab or a promise that the son has recovered, life moves on as if nothing has happened. Montages show Nic readjusting to normal life and David spending time with his son, his wife Karen (Maura Tierney), and the couple's two children. Just like the off-screen process of Nic becoming addicted, though, his relapses arrive without warning, and then life moves on again, only now with the fear of Nic wasting away unseen in some unknown place. This is the admirable part of Van Groeningen's approach. It recognizes that, when dealing with something like this, time progresses but somehow also seems to stand still. There were times when Nic wasn't in danger because of his addiction, but from here on out, there will never be a time when he isn't in danger of relapse or death. David eventually realizes this and finds himself out of options, out of words, and out of hope that he can do anything for his son. If Nic is chasing the feeling of his first hit of meth, David is chasing the idea that he can help his son. These are terrible realities, and the movie approaches them with restraint, while Carell's performance takes us through the torment of grieving for someone who's still alive. Admiration for the movie's formal choices, though, only goes so far. Although bringing it up seems contradictory to the purpose of the movie, which intentionally refuses to give answers, there is a dearth of understanding for the specifics of these characters. Van Groeningen's tactics provide a sense of the mood of David's journey, but our investment in this story never reaches deeper than its esoteric considerations of time and the inability to truly understand the causes of addiction. Beautiful Boy is so caught up in creating a general feeling of despair that we're kept at a distance from actually feeling it. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
Buy Related Products Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download) Buy the Book (Beautiful Boy) [Kindle Edition] Buy the (Tweak) [Kindle Edition]
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(for
drug content throughout, language, and brief sexual material)
