“The latest film from Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster, Beau is Afraid, is a shockingly bad epic that will make you wish you could get back the three hours it cost you.”
Average
-
The dazzling supporting performances of Patti LuPone, Zoe Lister-Jones, Parker Posey and Nathan Lane
-
Attractive visual style of Ari Aster
Against
-
Joaquin Phoenix’s awkward one-note lead performance
-
Ari Aster’s irritating and unnecessarily cruel script
-
Too long and complacent duration.
There are some filmmakers who enjoy the spontaneity of life and whose movies seem lively and unpredictable. Ari Aster is not one of those filmmakers. Aster is a director who not only demands control, but constantly communicates it. There is no moment to be found in either of the first two Aster movies, Hereditary and midsummerthat doesn’t seem to have been planned and executed exactly according to his vision.
In both films, the broken grip of his directing is necessary. Through unflinchingly smooth panoramas and methodically complex shots of his camerawork, Aster creates the feeling in his first two films that his characters have no control over their own stories, which only makes the horror of their lives all the more suffocating.
IN Beau is scaredAster’s style becomes a crutch, then a hindrance, and finally a source of irritation. The Ultimate Writer-Director is a three-hour journey through the life of a man who, as the film’s title suggests, is afraid of everything. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, the latest Aster protagonist is a cartoon avatar of pure, unadulterated angst. Although he evokes almost the same fear as the director’s previous attempts, Beau is scared It’s not a horror movie. Instead, it’s a zany comedy about the cumulative cost of guilt, lies, and all the other toxic emotions that can drag a person down.
With its multi-layered story and wicked sense of humor, there are moments where the film feels like the Frankensteinian result of the creative marriage between the Coen brothers and Charlie Kaufman. Unfortunately, Aster lacks the wry wit of the former and the broken humanity of the latter. He’s not so much interested in exploring the themes of his films as he is in constantly hammering characters with them until they inevitably succumb to madness, death, or both. IN Beau is scaredAster extends his fascination with life’s eternal torments to his audience, berating his viewers for almost three hours for daring to hope that there is actually more to one’s life than guilt, suffering and manipulation.
Takashi Seida/A24
Beau is scared It begins, like any movie about one man’s massive case of mother issues, in a therapist’s office. Through his initial conversation with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Phoenix’s Beau Wasserman’s crippling insecurities are exposed, as is his plans to visit his mother, Mona (Patti LuPone). ). When Henderson’s therapist, played by the actor with an unnerving Cheshire cat grin, compares LuPone’s Mona to a drained well, we immediately learn everything we need to know about Beau’s relationship with his mother.
Where Beau is scared going from there is less immediately clear. The film follows the beleaguered and gullible sad sack of Phoenix as he tries to get home for a visit Mona made him feel so bad he missed, but to call his journey a beeline would be like calling Beau is scared“skinny” runtime Along the way, Beau loses his apartment keys, gets hit by a car, ends up in the custody of a strangely possessive couple (played with seething madness by two of the film’s scene-stealers, Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), and later finds himself at a play in the woods. All this before he finally makes it home in time for a terribly hilarious encounter with his childhood crush, Elaine (Parker Posey).
The last scene seems to have been written by Aster in film school as a dare. This means that, on the one hand, he’s rebellious and unlike anything you’ve seen so far, and on the other hand, he’s dumber and younger than you can imagine. The same, unfortunately, can be said for much of Beau is scared. It’s the rare movie that proves that “unique” isn’t always a compliment, and neither is “shocking.” Not make mistakes: Beau is scared it is an impressive film. In its second and third hours, however, the film so completely burns away any goodwill it may have accumulated with its initial moments of subversion that it’s impossible not to meet its final set of twists with an increasingly exasperated series of sighs and eye-rolls. .
Courtesy of A24
Beau is scaredThe overwhelmingly flawed third act is made worse by how repetitive and drawn out the rest of the movie is. The film follows Beau through a series of freak accidents, most of which follow the same cycle of confusion, injury, and looney tunes-esque exhaust. Only the first act of the film, which depicts Beau’s desperate attempts to get out of the lawless inner-city neighborhood in which she lives, seems worth it. The piece is made up of a series of scenes, bad decisions and subversive twists that effectively plunge the viewer into the film’s slowly crumbling modern world and into the anxious mind of Phoenix’s protagonist.
However, once Beau is brought out of his apartment, the immersion Aster achieved during the first act of the film is lost. The writer-director continues to demean and denigrate the Phoenix Beau to the point where his authorial hand becomes inescapably present and obvious. Soon, Beau is scared It no longer feels like an examination of one man’s journey into the past, but more like an exercise in gleeful torture on the part of its creator. Even as the film’s central theatrical sequence, which injects visual variety through the use of green screen effects and animation, seems about to be given new meaning and heart. Beau is scaredIn his painful odyssey, Aster can’t help but get in the way once again to remind his protagonist that any attempt to find catharsis in his story is futile.
The insidious quality of the sequence’s conclusion only makes Aster’s clear allusions to the work of unique artists like Don Hertzfeldt, Michel Gondry, and Charlie Kaufman seem all the more undeserved. Plus, it’s one of the few parts of the film that has the potential to expand thematic and emotional territory. Beau is scared, but remains superficial due to a last minute prank by Aster. All in all, the cyclical nature of many of the film’s sequences only makes their bloated duration seem more and more gratuitous and bland. Behind the camera, Aster seems to be aware of it. Beau is scared it’s longer than it should be, but that awareness doesn’t make the viewing experience any less tedious or annoying.
Takashi Seida/A24
The movie’s immature sense of comedy and provocation is made even more galling by the success of so many other aspects. Aster, perhaps, has never felt so visually in control as here. Through runtime, Beau is scared it offers enough moments of brilliant visual construction that it’s impossible not to be impressed by some of Aster’s compositional and editorial decisions. This is especially true of a sequence in the film in which Zoe Lister-Jones delivers a monologue as a younger version of LuPone’s Mona. Aster not only maintains a low, static angle on Lister-Jones throughout the scene, but relies on a single light source: a rotating, multi-colored night lamp that illuminates Mona’s face in multiple colors, just like the rest of the characters. her body. she remains shrouded in darkness.
In terms of visual elements, the scene is relatively simple, but the effect it achieves is both disturbing and hypnotic. It’s a moment where Aster’s ability to highlight the mundane horrors of everyday life is incredibly clear, while also giving viewers a peek into version. Beau is scared it could have been much more tolerable and interesting than what Aster delivered. Despite the great work of many of the film’s actors (Lister-Jones and LuPone give particularly memorable performances), what could have been a reflective, nightmarish portrayal of one man’s life instead comes across as an exercise in Screaming childish in emotional distress that doesn’t even have the decency to justify his own. a perversely sadistic streak.
It’s the movie equivalent of the kid on the school bus who spends every day beating you on the back because he just can’t get over how ridiculously boring he finds other people. You know the type. The one that other people point to and say, “Whatever you do, just try not to be like that.” that child.” Beau is scared its alot That boy.
Beau is scared opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, April 21.
editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn