DAN WEBSTER:
As anyone who has even see a Coen Brothers movie knows, dark comedy is an acquired taste. It’s uncomfortable to laugh at someone being dispatched by woodchipper.
But dark comedy serves a purpose. It allows us to indulge in repressed emotions, few of which we’d ever want to reveal in public, and then let them go. It’s a means by which we can say: yes, bad things occur—death, disease, famine and war—but they don’t represent the full palate of human existence.
Tragedy goes hand in hand with comedy. And by admitting as much, we can go on. I’ve always been struck with the irony faced by the characters played by Walter Huston and Tim Holt who, near the end of the 1948 film version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, convulse with laughter as their hard-earned gold dust disappears in the Mexican wind.
Now let’s change course. Because this is a review of Ari Aster’s film Beau Is Afraid. And while the film is dark, it definitely is not a comedy—though throughout its three-hour running time, I kept wishing it were.
Our protagonist, Beau (played by Joaquin Phoenix), is hapless personified. He makes the car dealer played by William H. Macy in the Coen Brothers’ 1998 film Fargo look like the reincarnation of self-help guru Tony Robbins.
Beau lives in a run-down, graffiti-adorned apartment building set in a part of a big city rife with violence. Assuming he can even get to the building’s front entrance, no mean feat because the elevator barely functions, he has to brave a circus dance of potential danger just to cross the street—portrayed as a scene that might shock even the likes of the painter Hieronymus Bosch.
In the midst of all this furor, Beau is trying to get home to visit his mother (played by Patty Lupone). But everything—and I do mean every thing—conspires against him. A neighbor accuses him of playing music too loud, even, though Beau isn’t playing any music at all. And after several interruptions, he finally falls asleep… only to awaken to discover he’s running late for his flight.
Then in his panic to get ready, he leaves his suitcase and apartment keys unattended for the barest of seconds, and someone steals them. So, he has to call mom, who responds in the greatest passive-aggressive manner ever, causing him to take some pills prescribed by his therapist (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson). But the instructions say he must take them with water—and, mysteriously, the building’s water has been shut off.
So, Beau runs across the street and… well, let’s just say nothing about his plight improves. Aster specializes in exploring situations in which characters find themselves in predicaments, not always of their own making, that speak to their most inherent fears. See what happens to Toni Collette and her family in 2018’s Hereditary, or to Florence Pugh in 2019’s Midsommar.
Like those films, Beau Is Afraid is skillfully made, the production design alone worth year-end honors. And all of the cast members play their parts to perfection, from Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane as the weird couple who hold Beau captive, to Parker Posey as Beau’s long-lost love, to Lupone whose manipulative nature makes Joan Crawford look like mother of the year.
As for Phoenix, we’ve seen snatches of this before, from 1995’s To Die For to 2004’s The Village, 2012’s The Master, 2017’s You Were Never Really Here and most especially his Oscar-winning turn in 2019’s Joker. But nothing he has done is quite as intense as what Aster puts him through here.
Which brings us to Aster and his seeming need to indulge in plotlines that test the boundaries of emotional anguish. What I’ve outlined is not even half of what Beau is forced to endure, much of which plays out like a waking nightmare with obvious Freudian overtones.
And while other filmmakers—let’s again reference the Coen Brothers, for example—might do something similar, they’d at least work in a laugh or two. Aster, though, is content to let Beau flail away like a drowning man with no hope of salvation whatsoever. The question remains: who needs therapy more, Beau—or Aster himself?
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster writes about movies and more for Spokane7.com.