Beau is Afraid
A24Throughout the 2010s, A24 made a name for itself by crafting a legion of up-and-coming filmmakers with diverse perspectives and genuine cinematic inspiration which breathed new life into the mainstream modern film conversation. While those like Barry Jenkins, David Lowery, Greta Gerwig, and Yorgos Lanthimos would use this as a stepping stone to larger studios and projects, some directors remained in the A24 system with arguably the most successful being Ari Aster. Following up his 2018 breakout hit Hereditary, and his hallucinogenic 2019 follow-up Midsommar, Ari Aster embarks on his most ambitious project yet with Beau Is Afraid. The film follows a man named Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) as he prepares to visit his mother, Mona Wassermann (Patti LuPone), on the anniversary of his father's death. Beau is feeling apprehensive about his return home considering his more turbulent relationship with his mother and these fears are not helped as everything begins to go wrong for Beau leading to a fantastical and difficult road home that sees Beau confront the trauma of his past and the threats of the current. While one can easily praise the audacity of Aster to create a project of this size and insanity, his large swing exposes inherent flaws and weaknesses within Aster's mindset as a filmmaker leading to a shockingly hollow and misguided viewing experience.
With easily his largest budget to date, it should come as no surprise that Aster crafts a technically sound feature that accomplishes the fundamentals of filmmaking with clear proficiency. The cinematography from Pawel Pogorzelski is clean and focused while the production design is continually allowed to play with creativity and purpose. It would also be a shame not to mention a particularly strong animated sequence towards the center of the film that is a massive standout of the feature. There isn't a question if Ari Aster is a strong director or if A24 is capable of delivering a film of this size in a technical sense, these are proven talents and forces with no signs of stopping. The issues begin to pop up in the writing.
On paper, the thematic purpose of Beau is Afraid is a confusing one for the career trajectory of Aster. Focusing on a toxic relationship between mother and son with a deep desperation for love and acceptance, Beau is Afraid returns Aster disappointingly to many of the same messages and themes of Hereditary. Coming just 5 years after the release of that film, it feels noticeable that the director is retreading old ground which comes in contrast with the evolution seen by the filmmaker with his portrait of toxic love in Midsommar. It becomes clear that rather than presenting something new, Beau is Afraid is a greater exploration of cinematic scale than depth. This is where the flaws of Aster as a writer begin to become clear. In both Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster found power in showcasing complex sections of the human condition that often lead to complex trauma and emotional weight. Blending these emotions with a fantastical plot of demons and cults allowed for a narrative flow and payoff to come at the end of each feature, giving the film a sense of conclusion and direction.
When boiled down, however, neither of those films truly found something new to say or push when it came to these deeper emotions with their brooding presence being enough to create an atmosphere of worth. By breaking the grounded narrative roots that held together Hereditary and Midsommar, Beau is Afraid exposes this fatal flaw of Aster's writing as the audience is left with nothing but the thematic depth to analyze and attempt to interact with. Even in finding this divide between reality and fantasy, Aster proves incapable of handling a film of scale with the pacing becoming wildly uneven and messy. When one analyzes the flow of the plot for films that have walked this tightrope between what is real and what is fake, take mother! or Hereditary for example, there is a natural build towards the insanity that sees audiences gain their footing and invest in the grounded reality before they embrace the chaos of what is to come. This pathway allows for a natural link to be formed between these two identities and for the stakes of the film to naturally flow. Beau is Afraid abandons this pathway and pays for it.
By almost immediately breaking the illusion of reality, the film immediately alienates audiences from connecting with this world and its stakes in a form based in reality. While there is a way this can work, the film then asks for the audience to transition into a realm of understanding this story and its characters through the boundaries of reality, a task impossible due to the film's flow. This continues back and forth creating a film frustratingly ineffective which only is enhanced when it becomes clear the film has little perspective to add to its base thematic identity that is presented early. At a whopping 179 minutes long, Beau is Afraid becomes one of the most frustrating and inaccessible films of the year by even the halfway point with the reward never being worth the effort it takes to get through the project as a viewing experience.
Aster seemingly is aware of the narrative flaws within the feature as he tries to add small bits of social commentary, specifically within the first act of the feature, with some of the laziest and most questionable writing of the year. Feeling like the most bland and basic version of a Black Mirror episode, Aster paints a damming portrait of city life with references to police brutality, gun violence, the sensationalized news cycle, and the rising population of unhoused individuals. Not only are all these concepts mentioned quickly in passing with no relation to the larger plot, but the writing is so poor that the film begins to cross into problematic statements rather quickly. Aster continually paints these subjects with a focus that blames the individual people involved rather than the larger systems they connect to. The unhoused are portrayed as chaotic and dangerous with no regard for human life or decency. The police are portrayed as scared and unprepared. The violence is painted as being a quirky side effect of having individuals under mental crisis walking the streets. These messages reinforce that it is these individual people responsible for the unsafe environment that Beau finds himself in without any even implicit focus given to the systematic forces that have led to the flawed system that these bodies are forced to survive in. Facing this lack of perspective, Aster is quick to turn to comedy to try and get audiences through these segments but for those who critically think about what they are watching, something incredibly gross and harmful is found.
This writing undoubtedly is one of the reasons why the performances throughout the film struggle so much. Joaquin Phoenix is wasted and never is given the proper moment to shine or expel his inner emotions with his reserved bumbling persona growing old. Those like Kylie Rogers are almost comically done dirty with batshit insane performances that have no reason or logic while Parker Posey takes a character originally given complexity and reverts her to nothing more than a sexual outlet for Beau. The only actor who truly gets to shine is Patti LuPone as Beau's mother who brings a devilish wickedness that is clearly above anything else within the film when it comes to actual quality.
When all these factors are considered, one has to question why Beau is Afraid exists at all. If the film isn't going to display a worthy perspective and isn't going to have some reveal that explains the insanity the audience is forced to sit through, then why should anyone bother with the film? Beau is Afraid is an empty and taxing film that amounts to so little, the drive to the theater is hard to justify much less the absurd 179-minute runtime. Aster has taken the praise of both audiences and A24 and has clearly tricked himself to believe that the tricks he used to craft his features are not tricks but rather works of genuine genius. Aster clearly believes that he has the ability to explain and build on some of life's most challenging relationships, but his writing says otherwise. While Hereditary and Midsommar were wise in how they avoided this examination, Beau is Afraid is not and becomes a genuine disaster of the cinematic art form. Simply appearing to say something is not the same as actually saying something and Beau is Afraid is tragically a prime example of this.
