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Beau is Afraid ★★★
179 minutes, rated R
I was not afraid during Beau is Afraid, but I spent some time asking myself why I wasn’t, given that writer-director Ari Aster was so plainly doing his damnedest to freak me out.
Joaquin Phoenix in a scene from “Beau is Afraid.”Credit: Takashi Seida/A24 via AP
Maybe that’s the problem with this three-hour “nightmare comedy,” a surreal departure from Aster’s previous horror films Hereditary and Midsommar. The effort is all there on the surface, to the point where after a while I struggled to feel much beyond an abstract admiration for his work ethic.
On top of that, there’s nothing grounding the movie, no baseline reality beyond whatever the actors can bring. The initial setting is an imaginary city that resembles a paranoid’s vision of New York (albeit mainly white – Beau Is Afraid gets into some tricky themes, but race isn’t one of them).
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Obscene graffiti is everywhere, signs and billboards carry bizarre messages, a serial killer is committing his crimes in broad daylight. And through this everyday hellscape lumbers Beau, who’s both an innocent victim and a super-creep in his own right, and who could well be – this is a big call, I know – the most pathetic character of Joaquin Phoenix’s career.
Balding, unkempt, constantly on the verge of whimpering collapse, Beau is the middle-aged man-baby to end all middle-aged man-babies, so palpably inadequate that in close-up you might expect to see beads of sweat flying off him as if he were drawn by Robert Crumb.
What is Beau afraid of, his immediate surroundings aside? Pretty well everything, but the list would have to be headed by his overbearing mother (Patti LuPone), introduced as a voice at the end of a phone and later revealed as a fabulously wealthy businesswoman.
Disappointingly, the film shows little interest in filling us in on the specifics of her career, or indeed on what Beau himself has been doing for most of his adult life. We do gather she bears some responsibility for our hero’s issues about sex, which emerge partly through flashback over the course of a plot that’s one misadventure after another.