Midweek Update: 'Beau Is Afraid' and Desperate for Your Emotions

[Spoilers ahead for Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid]

This past weekend, I went to see writer/director Ari Aster’s latest movie, Beau Is Afraid. I wasn’t a fan of Aster’s previous two features, Hereditary and Midsommar, but I was lured back in by the concept of a three-hour comedy starring Joaquin Phoenix. At the very least, it would be a big swing, right?

But Beau Is Afraid cements both Aster’s strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker. I feel like part of the acclaim for Aster comes from his ability to craft compelling visuals coupled with an unflinching look at gruesome violence. These two elements, along with the bleakness of the narratives, make Aster out to be a bold storyteller who goes to incredible dark places to arrive at a kind of twisted catharsis. Beau Is Afraid was supposed to be a break from the horror stories, and go in a more comic direction with Aster telling Entertainment Weekly, “It's like a Jewish Lord of the Rings but he's just going to his mom's house.”

That’s…not the movie. On the one hand, the film is certainly ambitious in trying to capture the totality of a life, but the life of a loser. The problem is that, like with Aster’s previous two movies, he’s so eager to get to the emotional impact that he fails to craft any kind of world building where the emotions make sense.

To get into spoiler territory, the film starts with Beau (Joaquin Phoenix in a performance that doesn't really seem to challenge him; he basically acts like a timid little boy for most of the film because that’s what the script requires) planning to visit his mom, Mona (Patti LuPone), but he oversleeps his alarm because of a threatening notes being slipped under his door all night. When he’s getting ready to leave, the keys are stolen out of his door, so he has to cancel his flight. He then learns that his mother’s head was smashed in by a falling chandelier, and that there can’t be a funeral until he gets to her house.

If this plot sounds absurd, that’s because it is. The premise of Beau Is Afraid isn’t, “Jewish Lord of the Rings.” It’s the idea of, “What if all of your anxieties were real?” That’s not a bad idea, but Aster struggles to build upon it. The first hour of the film is basically this concept repeated constantly—we’re seeing “the worst that could happen” play out in front of a hapless Beau, a man who’s too childlike to make any decisions or claim any agency in his own life. He’s a purposefully reactive character because the film (as it drags on) is fascinated by the central question—who is responsible for Beau’s character—Beau or his mother?

The entire film, from its opening shot of Beau exiting his mother’s birth canal (a scene that only reminded me of this joke from The Office), is trying to answer the question of whether Beau is the way he is because his mother was overprotective or because he never chose to grow up, which isn’t a bad question. At what point do we become responsible for our own lives? But because the film is rendered in such broad, obvious strokes where no one really behaves like a recognizable human being, the question becomes irrelevant. The question only has meaning if it has nuance and specificity to these characters, and Beau and his mother, are caricatures. Beau is the scared little boy and Mona is the overbearing mother who’s all-too-ready to guilt-trip her son from the moment of his birth and keep him sexually repressed.

You see, Beau’s father apparently died when he climaxed at the moment of Beau’s conception due to a heart murmur that Beau also has. This leads to some psychosexual, Freudian moments that never come to fruition because the film, again, can’t say anything with any specificity. It’s all concept plus an emotional sledgehammer. Sure, the film forces us to share in Beau’s anxieties and feelings of guilt, but to what end? For Aster, it’s an end in and of itself, and that’s why I keep coming away from his movies feeling irritated by the hollow majesty on display.

Hereditary and Midsommar are arguably movies about grief. In Hereditary, Annie (Toni Collette) loses her mother at the beginning of the movie, and then about halfway through, her son Peter (Alex Wolff) gets into a car accident that decapitates his younger sister Charlie (Milly Shapiro) (Aster, unflinching in his willingness to show grotesque things, lingers on a shot of ants devouring Charlie’s decapitated head). Annie, in her grief, tries to commune with Charlie’s spirit only to invite the evil cult of Paimon into their home. The evil basically obliterates the whole family with Annie ultimately sawing off her own head with piano wire.

In Midsommar, the film begins with a depressed young woman killing herself and her parents by filling the house with carbon monoxide and duct taping a hose connected to the tailpipe to her own mouth. The deceased woman’s sister, Dani (Florence Pugh), then goes with her jerk boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his pals to attend a midsummer festival at a commune in Sweden. Dani is ultimately selected the commune’s May Queen, which means she oversees the human sacrifices to purge the community of evil. She has the choice of sparing Christian, but decides to let him burn alive in a bear suit. Purging Christian becomes synonymous with Dani purging herself of her grief.

Both films have horrific imagery, but they also feel emotionally dishonest, taking tragedy and then winding up with a bizarre individual/cult dynamic. If Aster believes that emotional catharsis from such grief is impossible, that’s fine, but his first two movies sputter out because they wind up as the largest horror being the loss of individuality to join the cultish other (Peter gets taken over by Paimon to lead the coven and Dani is now the May Queen, but these transformations don’t address the characters’ underlying grief and guilt beyond reducing the characters to pawns in a game played by the cult).

Grief, guilt, and now anxiety come to the fore in Beau Is Afraid, but again, it doesn’t lead to anything. Striking imagery abounds and there are even some good jokes, but like Aster’s previous movies, the emotions and visuals appear to exist independently of a cohesive world. At one point, Beau is being hunted by Jeeves (Denis Ménochet), a traumatized war veteran who fought alongside the deceased Nathan, son of Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane). When Grace and Roger’s teenage daughter, Toni (Kylie Rogers) commits suicide in front of Beau by drinking paint, Grace blames Beau and sends Jeeves to kill him. Jeeves storms the encampment of a traveling group of performers where Beau is hiding out. Jeeves then accidentally shoots himself with a submachine gun before blowing himself up. Jeeves later reappears unharmed and starts shooting at a giant mutant penis that lives in Mona’s attic.

Directors don’t need to be tethered to narrative or even our reality to tell good stories. David Lynch has made a successful career just playing by his own rules. But the important thing is that he has rules. His realities are strange, but they are lived-in and make sense. Blue Velvet has its share of weird stuff, but it holds together. Eraserhead is incredibly strange and purposefully off-putting, but it’s all in service to some clear themes and deep fears. By comparison, Beau Is Afraid is a meandering slog that consistently feels like Aster is chasing the latest shiny object without much care into how the piece functions as a whole, so what you’re left with is something that can only work in its broadest strokes of “this makes me feel anxious.”

And that’s not really good enough. Simply conjuring an emotion divorced from anything but an image is little more than a call-and-response. If I show you a picture of a baby and a puppy, you’ll likely feel warm and fuzzy. If I show you a naked homeless man stabbing someone on the street (as Beau Is Afraid does), you’ll likely feel uncomfortable. But these emotions play as cheap tricks when they’re untethered from anything substantial. Aster has yet to learn that extreme emotional reactions are meaningless when the end of the film leaves you with little more than a shrug.

What I’m Watching

Succession and Barry continue to be excellent television. I know there’s other TV shows I should be watching, but I’m not really up for it at the moment. Also, I’m a bit perplexed by those who say the latest season of Barry has lost the show’s humor. Season 4 is undeniably bleak, and certainly a far cry from the comedy of the first season. But it still feels like the natural arc of the show that understands its core theme about the impossibility of changing who you are without real work and self-examination. The comedy tempers the show’s core statement, which is that for Barry, he will always be a cold-blooded murderer. Some may find the show miserable now, but I still think it’s throwing out fantastic jokes every episode. There are shows where the comedy runs dry or no longer works, but Barry’s dark absurdity is as strong as ever.

What I’m Reading

Here’s three articles I recently read and had some thoughts on:

• “Anne Perry, Crime Writer With Her Own Dark Tale, Dies at 84” by Anita Gates [New York Times] - Perry passed away a couple weeks ago, and it’s interesting how “her own dark tale” has receded a bit from public memory. It’s the basis for the 1994 movie Heavenly Creatures starring Kate Winslet (who played the young Perry) and Melanie Lynskey (giving one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from a child actor). I’d recommend seeking out Heavenly Creatures, but you can’t. I imagine that has something to do with it being a Miramax film and that studio’s rights being a nightmare at the moment, but if you manage to track down a copy, you’ll see a compelling and tragic narrative that may not be one Perry wanted told, but still manages to resonate all the same.

• “Bob Rafelson” by Noel Murray [A.V. Club] - This 2010 interview with Rafelson coincided with the release of Criterion’s BBS box set. I finally bought that set and watched all the movies, so I finally read this interview. It’s a great piece with Rafelson being at turns candid, self-deprecating, and brutally incisive about the film industry and trying to get films made in and outside of the system. Even if you’ve never seen any of the films in the BBS set, the interview is worth your time for Rafelson’s perspective.

• “Joe Russo & 'Fortnite's Donald Mustard Weigh In on the Future of Storytelling, Gaming & Entertainment” by Tamera Jones [Collider] - At a panel moderated by Collider, this quote from director Joe Russo raised an eyebrow: I read the quote in context, and it’s basically Russo and Mustard arguing in favor of using AI to allow the audience to construct whatever they want. What feels particularly galling about it is that Russo, a man with an artistic background, seems so gung-ho about abdicating the role of the artist. If you had a story to tell, what you would want to cede that to any software? From a business perspective, I’m sure there’s something exciting in that “the audience is always right” and so you can make your rom-com starring you and Marilyn Monroe (because apparently Monroe didn’t suffer enough in life we need to reanimate her corpse and make it dance for us). But for anyone who values creativity, Russo seems to actively reject such a position because it’s more exciting give that job to a computer.

What I’m Hearing

I didn’t much care for how Coldest Case in Laramie turned out. It used a mystery to come to some fairly banal conclusions about the nature of memory and shoddy police work. It feels like it exists not because it was particularly strong journalism, but because The New York Times and Serial have a partnership and needed to generate content.

Over on the music side, I’m amped for the new album from The National. I’ve been listening to this single in particular quite often:

What I’m Playing

Still a lot of Hitman (you may as well skip this section until May 12th when I’ll start playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom). I’ve completed the first game and have now moved on to Hitman 2. As I said over on Substack Notes, I think the reason the Hitman movies don’t work (or at least one reason they don’t work) is because they play the plot too straight and try to be action films when the nature of the games is inherently absurd. Even IOI, the game’s developer, know that Hitman is darkly comic, and it’s far better to lean into that aspect rather than some story of international intrigue.