Review: BEAU IS AFRAID

After a prologue of Beau's birth seen from his perspective we get the scene in the folk tale where the elder (his analyst) gives the quester (a middle aged Beau) a magic object (pills) with instructions that must be followed on pain of peril. Then we follow Beau through his bizarrely dangerous neighbourhood to his apartment where his neighbour sends him increasingly threatening notes about the noise he's making (Beau is actually in bed trying to sleep). The neighbour retaliates with a massive techno track so loud it shakes the walls. Beau plugs his ears which makes him sleep through his alarm with only a tiny margin to get his plane to go and see his mother. Small mounting disasters keep happening until he has to call his mother who hears his plight as a contemptuous excuse. And then he takes the pills. This film is given a running time of 179 minutes, 1 minute short of the full 3 hours. There's a point to that and it has to do with this moment. That's the depth of the jokes in this sprawling absurdist epic. That's why the jokes are never that funny. And it's still three hours long.

Could it be shorter? By half and it would still tell the same story. But Ari Aster's third feature film plays a delicate balance, plunging into bleak fantasy here or restraining everything when the long and verbose explanations are running (because, boy, do they need grounding). If you've seen the poster art with Beau at different ages and you might have assumed it was a kind of Benjamin Button deal or a Terrence Malik stretch but Aster is determined that it would be neither. If you're still worried, there is a clear narrative line all the way through and not a moment of this movie is boring. However, just as the post climactic scenes start dragging you do start wondering how much longer you'll be waiting for the credits. See also both his previous feature films. He's just a film maker that can't just say goodbye. But if you do get through all that you will feel a strong satisfaction ... at the same time as wonder if you really did spend all that time just for that.

What helps is that Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Beau is masterful. Most of his dialogue is slurred through medication or the effects of violence and he has far fewer lines than most of the other central characters. This is a physical performance and, when you stretch your appreciation of it over the three hour running time you will know it as a muscular and highly refined act of clowning. This is a comedy in the classical Greek sense in that it tells the workings of the cosmos as a joke by wrenching a basic theme (mummy issues) and wringing it dry before us. Phoenix has to play this role rock solid as that clown as the story itself is fighting him. It is very hard to empathise with him (and so share his sense of hazard that all protagonists must convey) until the film is well into its second hour. By the end we feel nothing but empathy and it is almost entirely down to his stony restraint. As film performances go this is much Brando than Buster Keaton. As the universe shifts around him from hard realism to painted cardboard landscapes he compels us to keep our eyes directly on him. This, finally, what makes three hours feel relatively breezy.

I'm keeping this review quite short not just to be cute (although that is a motivation) but simply because relaying so much plot for a film that continually circles back to its theme rather than significant action seems like a diminishing return. When it was about half way through I thought of a line: this is what you get when you let Charlie Kauffman remake After Hours. But then the pieces began to suggest themselves and take on more definition. Before, when I described this as an absurdist film and said that's why the jokes aren't funny I didn't mean that absurdist humour (my favourite kind) wasn't funny. If anything the jokes and sly references here are very sensible and tend to jar because they feel too conventional. By the end I ditched the line about Kauffman doing Scorsese trying to be funny and thought instead that it's much more like Malik done right. There is no mysticism here, not even the vague and useless deity that Malik paints with watercolours. Beau is Afraid is set firmly on the tough dark earth. And that's why it works. And it's still three hours long!