Beau is Afraid: Ari Aster Plumbs the Depths of Fear and Self-Doubt in a Long, Surrealist Nightmare
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-plus
Sometimes I wish I could just acknowledge that a movie has been released and then suggest we meet back here in six months after I’ve thoroughly processed it.
That’s how I feel about Beau Is Afraid, the new, very darkly comic film from American writer/director Ari Aster, that stars Joaquin Phoenix and runs for an epic three hours.
There is an overarching story and some obvious themes, including the extreme fear suggested in the film’s title. There’s also anxiety, masculinity, toxic femininity, toxic mothers, the road not taken, etc.
But there’s also plenty going on beneath the surface, clues that a movie that is already surrealist enough, might be even more surreal than you can catch in one viewing.
Joaquin Phoenix is paralyzed with fear in Beau is Afraid.
The film centers around Beau Wassermann, (Phoenix, in yet another superb performance), a nondescript guy in his forties who lives in a mostly bare apartment in a bad building in a bad part of town.
To get into his building he must race past a crazy salad of street life, including a tattooed and body-modified guy who is out to get him, so that Beau must race to get into the building and shut the door. Even inside his apartment he isn’t completely safe from the craziness, as we soon find out.
Beau has just come from his longtime therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson). He can’t seem to string words together and seems dead in the eyes, suggesting he’s overly drugged.
In spite of that, his therapist writes him a prescription for new meds, saying the side effects will be less than what he’s currently enduring, even though Beau hasn’t complained about side effects.
The session, though, is timely. The next day, Beau will head out on his annual trip home to his mother, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of his father, who died before he was born. And we get that Beau’s relationship with his mother is, well, fraught, and that might be the tip of the iceberg.
Even before Beau leaves his apartment, things go wrong. He oversleeps. His house keys and luggage are stolen from outside his apartment, which sets off a nightmare of problems that ultimately sees him running screaming into the street soaking-wet and nude.
He gets hit by a car and wakes up two days later in bed at the home of Grace and Roger, (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane), the couple whose car hit him, and their daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers).
Roger is a surgeon (or so we’re told) who has the medical resources to care for him. Beau is badly banged up, but is desperate to get to his mother’s. He’s too wounded to fly, so Roger offers to drive him, although that keeps getting pushed back to tomorrow.
And the family that looks so classic Americana, gets weirder, and weirder, ultimately forcing Beau to escape into the woods behind their house clad in his pajamas.
And so it goes. Much of the rest of the film is taken up with Beau trying to get to his mother’s, but being slowed down by unusual encounters, including a travelling theatre troupe. It’s night so they invite him to watch their latest play, that just so happens to be telling a story about his life, or rather the path he hasn’t taken.
In between we get snatches of his recurring dreams, of memories in flashbacks, all of which start to paint a picture of who Beau is. Or who he might be. (Bear with me on this one)
For a long time the movie plays like a perfect metaphor for deep persistent existential angst and crippling anxiety. Beau lives his life with the background hum of deep terror in his head. He is attacked, bullied, invaded, isolated, shown the life he yearns for and might have had if he’d had a bit more luck and a lot less fear.
With a tone of surrealism and dark humour, and the relentlessness of the punishments that Beau experiences, the question is, is this really Beau’s life? Or are we inside his head, listening to his inner dialogue of negative self, talk, criticism, and crippling fears.
The crowd outside his house, the various people he encounters, all could be real, or could be happening inside his imagination. It’s always the worst possible scenarios, and if you’re a fan of Ari Aster and wondering where the horror is, well, there you have it. Beau can’t win for losing. It’s terrifying.
This is Aster’s third film. His first two, Hereditary and Midsommar established him as a solid storyteller drawn to the occult horror movies of the ‘70s, which he referenced heavily in both movies. Aster, showed his strength as a director, creating genuinely creepy circumstances, with scenes that were genuinely rattling. My favourite, in Hereditary, happens off camera and still gives me goosebumps.
Beau, on the other hand, is different. The tone, at times, is darkly comic, and satirical. The story seems less influenced by those ‘70s classics he loves, and more by classical literature like The Odyssey, and Oedipus Rex, stories that define psychological archetypes.
And that sense of the mythic is even captured in Beau’s name. Beau, French for beautiful, Wassermann, German and Yiddish, Water Man. Water, an element with that has a myriad of metaphorical meaning - from representing the unconscious, to the idea of rebirth - is a recurring theme in the movie.
Beau is not living up to his name. He’s a lost soul of sorts, paralyzed by fears and barely showing up on the radar of life. He can’t make decisions, and asks for help trying to make them.
And when he’s straightforward, people ignore him, or bully him, or terrorize him in some way. There are constant references to his behaviour causing humiliation to people, notably his mother.
He’s also terrified of his own masculinity, which is another undercurrent that hums in the film. And for negative representations of what masculinity looks like to him, you need only look outside his apartment window where there is a range of men doing crazy, often violent things.
The women in the film don’t fare much better. Beau is a fatherless child, raised by a single mother who, as we see in numerous flashbacks, put lots of ideas in his head.
Anyone with a background in basic psychology can glean that it might have something to do with his relationship with his mother, played young in flashbacks by Zoe Lister-Jones, and in the present by Patti LuPone. Lupone’s scenes are fantastic. She’s the coldest cruelest mother, colder than the stepmothers of fairy tales. (It’s early yet, but this could get her an Oscar nomination.)
Toxic mothers and women are sprinkled all through the film. Watching Beau made me realize that toxic women, “the negative feminine,” has been a recurring theme in Aster’s movies: the Satanic grandmother in Hereditary, the bad girlfriend in Midsommar. And now the crazies in this film. His female characters are more than just lethal. Does Aster have a woman problem?
But there is more going on in Beau is Afraid than just a stunted man with a bad relationship with mum. There are hints towards the end that there is something else hidden just out of sight in Beau’s life that might plunge Beau, and the rest of us, deeper into the rabbit hole of his existence.
The movie is full of mysteries. But the biggest one is, is it all metaphor? Are we ever really looking at the real Beau, or are we constantly in the land of metaphor inside his head?
Whatever is going on, Aster, who says this film is personal to him, is drawn to horror for a reason. Beau’s worst fears, worst thoughts are put out into the world for all of us to see, and it is not a place that any of us would want to live.
If there is anything to glean from a first viewing, it’s that we might consider that most of us live with a certain amount of fear and anxiety, that limit us. Beau is living in a kind of illusion, and is his own obstacle.
Perhaps Aster is suggesting that we look at him as a cautionary tale, and consider that getting past these fears might net us the life so deeply yearn for, but remains out of our reach.
Beau Is Afraid. Written and directed by Ari Aster. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Parker Posey. In theatres, April 21.