Mommy is a cockblocker. The premise is a classic—it’s the basis for Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” for one, which is personal, detailed, stylish, historically informed, culturally insightful, and uproariously funny. “Beau Is Afraid,” written and directed by Ari Aster, is none of those things; it’s a complaint without a complainer, because its protagonist, unlike Roth’s, has almost no voice or discernible inner life, and because its maker, unlike Roth, hides behind narrative trickery. Beau Isaac Wassermann (played by Joaquin Phoenix) is afraid of sex, and for good reason. He was raised by his mother in the shadow of a horror story: his father died while having sex with her for the first time, on their wedding night, when Beau was conceived. The cause was a congenital (!) heart murmur, one with which Beau, too, is afflicted. As a result, the middle-aged Beau, born in 1975, has never had sex. The film doesn’t make it clear if Beau ever masturbated as a teen-ager, or ever had a wet dream and wondered why he didn’t drop dead in his sleep. Did Beau never think to consult a doctor at any time? Or is he really such a dimwit as to have taken his mother’s word for it, for nearly half a century?
“Beau Is Afraid” is a dystopian fantasy in the present tense, a stylized environment of misery that dramatizes the strange stranglehold that Beau’s mother, Mona, has over his psyche and physical being. (She’s played, in the present day, by Patti LuPone and, in flashbacks to Beau’s adolescence, by Zoe Lister-Jones.) The desperately anxious Beau is about to visit Mona on the occasion of his parents’ anniversary (and of his father’s death and his own conception). Beau lives in a dilapidated, garbage-strewn, dysfunctional neighborhood of violence, near-anarchy, and apparent poverty, in which a corpse lies ignored in the middle of the street and swarms of ravaged-looking people run rampage. (Whenever Beau approaches or leaves his building, he’s chased menacingly by one of them and has to flee at top speed.) TV news is filled with reports of lurid murders by a naked killer; Beau’s graffiti-riddled building, alongside a peep-and-porn shop called Erectus Ejectus, features a posted warning to tenants of a deadly spider on the loose.
But Beau’s trip to see Mom is impeded by a rapid series of mysterious misfortunes. Harassments cause him to oversleep. Lightning-fast thieves steal his keys. He has to take his meds with water, but his water is shut off; when he goes across the street to a nightmarish convenience store to buy a bottle, zombie-like derelicts occupy and trash his apartment. He calls his mother and learns that she has just died in a household accident; settling into a bath, he has to fight off yet another intruder, runs naked into the street, and is hit by a truck. Distressingly, the scripting of this Rube Goldberg-esque chain of calamities is by far the best thing in the film. It at least takes a modicum of imagination to conceive them, even if they’re silly, bombastic, and redolent of revulsion for the poor and broken people who live in the neighborhood.
This is a back-loaded film, one that (like another recent, much better movie, “Don’t Worry Darling”) depends entirely on late-breaking revelations, so I’ll be very careful with spoilers. Suffice it to say that Beau’s mommy complex proves very complicated indeed, and that, even after learning of her death, he continues to be greatly in thrall to the commands that she issued in her lifetime—not least, her stipulation, conveyed to Beau by her lawyer, Dr. Cohen (Richard Kind), that her funeral not be held until Beau arrives for it. The Wassermanns are Jewish, and Jewish law requires burials to occur within twenty-four hours of death, so Mona’s testamentary demand places pressure on Beau. Even after Beau is hit by a truck, Dr. Cohen hectors him to hasten to his mother’s house and spare the family the “humiliation” of the delay. (Yet the movie doesn’t actually mention this religious dictum, and it makes next to nothing of the family’s heritage, and ignores Beau’s religious identification or lack of it.)
At that point, “Beau Is Afraid” morphs into a weird but wan Odyssey parody, as Beau—being cared for at the home of the people whose truck hit him, a surgeon (Nathan Lane) and an executive (Amy Ryan)—makes exceptional efforts to get to his mother’s house. He suffers a Job-like litany of misfortunes along the way: he’s threatened by a teen-aged girl (Kylie Rogers) with false accusations of sexual abuse, he’s wrongly accused of killing a teen-ager, he’s chased into the wild by a crazed and heavily armed Army veteran (Denis Ménochet), and he randomly encounters someone who claims that Beau’s father is still alive. The story of Beau is that of a coming to consciousness; much of the drama involves his finding the warps and cracks in perception. But Beau isn’t given a chance to perceive, to think. It’s telling that the most surprising image in the film is one that shows Beau’s point of view, gazing upward, as he’s being dragged supine against his will—as if Aster’s vision is unconsciously sharpened by showing what the movie suppresses throughout, what Beau knows.
The movie offers stylization without style. Several of its locations are overstuffed with eye-catching décor, its blasted city streets are filled with would-be-Bosch-like grotesques in frenetic action, but Aster’s choreography of the action is mainly functional; his cinematographic depictions are energetic but insignificant. It’s similarly noteworthy that the movie’s heights of stylization—involving a nose-holding, pearl-clutching depiction of poverty—are themselves dubious, assimilated to Beau’s miseries. The troubles that Beau endures in his neighborhood—like all the other ills that befall him throughout the film and all the bad things that happen to anyone throughout, all the ugliness and the monstrosity, all the violence and the lies—are, eventually, somehow, through one or another series of intricate causal connections, blamed on Mona.
Thus Aster comes through with clean hands—expressing no repellent and revulsed portrait of the urban poor, no dubiously suspicious depictions of immigrant employees, no sordid view of the abuses of #MeToo accusations, no rancidly jaundiced portrayal of a mentally ill victim of war trauma but, rather, making clear that they’re all Mommy’s fault. It’s about the only thing that Aster is expressing for himself. Yet the movie hardly has anything to say about Beau’s actual relationship to his mother and the role that she plays in his life. In a flashback to a vacation cruise that the adolescent Beau (Armen Nahapetian) took with Mona, he gets an earful of her blunt and caustic wisdom. He also gets into a budding romance with a girl named Elaine (Julia Antonelli), whom he promises to wait for, and whose picture the grown Beau still keeps by his bedside. The movie also features Beau’s recurring dream of a strange childhood encounter with his mother in an isolated space in the family home. All eventually becomes clear—the jigsaw-puzzle pieces fit together. What doesn’t become clear is any aspect of Beau’s life with his mother that doesn’t fit into the movie’s rigidly determined pattern and that doesn’t lead to its predetermined and problem-solving outcome.
The hunger for imagination without difficulty, for elaborate yet unchallenging fantasies that feed preconceptions, is apparently as great in the art-house world as it is at the multiplexes. Yet another extended scene of Beau’s imaginings—a variation on “The play’s the thing,” a stage performance that sparks his vision of a counterlife—is pallidly abstracted, ungrounded, impersonal. For all the fantasy elements of “Beau Is Afraid,” however, the movie isn’t a work of Surrealism but merely of unrealism. The difference is that a work of Surrealism gets at what’s hidden in ordinary life. Aster’s unrealism does exactly the opposite: it conceals and obscures what’s substantial in Beau’s ordinary life. A depiction of Beau’s undramatic experiences on the day before the story begins would reveal far more about his character—and about the world—than does the elaborate contrivance of which the film is actually made. But Aster is either unwilling or unable to conjure such practical, humble, but significant doings. “Beau Is Afraid” shares a crucial trait with another recent cinematic stacked-deck contrivance, “Tár”: it shows only what fits the outcome, not what’s important about the character. “Beau Is Afraid” launches into Beau’s dreams and hallucinations, which is to say into his fantasy inner life, without touching on his far more complex, if less sensationalistic, realistic inner life—namely, his memories, his knowledge about himself, what he has done, how he has lived, the network of plain but vastly important events on which the entire dramatic fiction depends.
“Beau Is Afraid” is a nearly three-hour rant about a cockblocking Jewish mother that has more or less nothing to say about Judaism or, for that matter, about sex, either—even though the movie does feature a giant penis, with a head about the span of a beach umbrella and with the color and eyes (yes, eyes) of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. What does Beau do for a living? What are his interests, who are his friends, how does he spend his time, what has his relationship with his mother been like in all these years? Or, perhaps, how has she kept him under her thumb throughout his adult life to deprive him of his basic fulfillment? Aster can’t be bothered to work it out. Or, rather, the film depends on this blankness, on letting viewers know almost nothing about what Beau knows about himself and about his mother. To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
