Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Smart, Zoe Lister-Jones, Denis Menochet, Parker Posey, Richard Kind
Intro:
If you are prepared for a big viewer commitment and relish those animated discussions afterwards (everyone will have a different bit to pick apart/comment on), then go. But also, be afraid, be very afraid.
To suggest Ari Aster has mother issues might be like pointing out that bears defecate in the woods. But he doesn’t just use his background to fire his imagination, he insists on putting it ALL out there in a sprawling three-hour bat-shit crazy vision that comes across as something like Medea crossed with The Truman Show.
Of course, Oedipal explorations of voracious (and, yes, sometimes Jewish) mothers have been the stuff of cinema for decades, and consequently there are dozens of reference points and filmic nods in this potpourri. Still, you could say this is the mother of all mother movies. It makes Darren Aronofsky (who kind of went there in Mother! In 2017) look like a sane and understated realist.
At this point, we would normally proceed to some description of the setting and the plot, but we have to admit partial defeat. The film more or less deconstructs all of those elements. Of course, there is a logic to throwing out logic, but that is part of the paradox of this film. This could be read as a three-hour dream sequence. It also tries to get inside everyday ‘normal’, medicated semi-psychosis in a scattershot yet highly cinematic way.
To be fair, it starts arrestingly. Joaquin Phoenix – who after his Oscar turn as a disintegrating man in The Joker, must have been the first (if not only) choice for this role – plays the eponymous Beau. He is a slightly portly, traumatised man-child who lives in a kind of Lynchian world (think real estate run by Eraserhead and Twin Peaks Ltd)).
His shrink (a delightfully creepy performance from Stephen McKinley Henderson) has put him on meds, but these have to be taken with water. Beau’s day starts badly when he swallows the tablet but realises that his taps don’t work. Cue a nightmarish dash to the local convenience store.
This would be fine if the street outside his block wasn’t littered with dead bodies, junkies, and naked crazies randomly stabbing people. This is a kind of end of days scenario that Cormac McCarthy would have been proud of, but Aster seems to present it as just another day in the neighbourhood. From there, it all goes further downhill (or off the rails) and at a duration and pace which is frankly exhausting.
Beau is supposed to be visiting his mega rich and mega mad mother (Patti LuPone), but to get there, he has to traverse a fairy-tale world of hero’s challenges.
Of course, people will say that you are not expected to read this film literally. As indicated, it inhabits a dream (that is, nightmare) world with its own inner logic. The problem is that unless you are being paid to listen as a shrink is, these dreams can become both baffling and, let’s say, tedious.
Aster has only made a few films, but his Hereditary and Midsommer gave us a taste of how he likes to get weird and dreamlike and nasty all at the same time. He is better at horror than he is at straight drama. Here, he has all the budget but none of the discipline.
It is no doubt going to be a cult movie for some, and Phoenix throws himself into the role in a way which is never less than watchable. He really is a remarkable actor. Also, some of the set pieces (and there’s a dozen of them in the three hours running time) are indelible, but there is definitely a law of diminishing returns here. The cinematic and literary tropes and references pile up and more or less bury us. By the end, it is hard to really hang in there and to continue to care about poor old put-upon Beau.
If you are prepared for a big viewer commitment and relish those animated discussions afterwards (everyone will have a different bit to pick apart/comment on), then go. But also, be afraid, be very afraid.
