Review: Beau Is Afraid is genius
Some movies have a way of getting under your skin before you’ve even seen them.
You go about your life, unaware that particular events are leading you to an emotional and mental space in which you will encounter a masterwork. And because you’ve been living through these events, you are primed, in a way you never could’ve been otherwise, to receive said masterwork.
This is what happened to me with Beau Is Afraid.
The day before I saw it, I took a 9:45 AM Metro North train from Poughkeepsie to Grand Central — or, at least, I tried to. Five minutes after the train departed, it halted on its tracks and remained frozen for another hour. “Mechanical issues,” a rather embarrassed conductor explained to his passengers over the train intercom; the railway’s workers were not able to resolve the situation, and when it came time for the 10:45 to pass by, it stopped so that gangplanks could be laid out for us to cross over.
While waiting for this transfer to happen, I tried listening to Mozart and reading from the book I had on hand, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. An ironic pairing, for I was in no mood to be either calm or stoic.
Once aboard the new train, I found myself seated beside a rather nice, rather anxious woman — also from the earlier train — who I could tell wanted to talk about what she was going through. I obliged her. It turns out, she was on her way to visit with her clinically paranoid and delusional son; twenty-five years old, she explained, and he was still incapable of living on his own, too far out of her sight.
I was startled by her story and deeply sympathetic. It didn’t occur to me that, indeed, I was planning on seeing a film the very next day about a man (played by Joaquin Phoenix) of just such a severely dysfunctional character — him, too, with a mother (Patti LuPone) who made it her mission to oversee his well-being.
Strangely, the rest of my day was full of similar setbacks: the first person I met in Manhattan was also delayed by over an hour on his own train, I took the wrong subway to reach my second appointment, and a friend’s book launch-drag show that evening was held up for forty-five minutes due to the lateness of several performers. I ended up getting home, back upstate, at two in the morning — and on the drive from the train station I was closely tailed for several minutes by a police car, until it pulled off and slipped into the night.
When it came time to watch Beau Is Afraid the following day, I was tired and, frankly, slightly delusional. My brain wasn’t functioning as well as it could, what with the strained nerves and lack of sleep, which made me more vulnerable to wild, internal conjectures and escapist fantasies.
I was overwhelmed by what I saw. Beau Is Afraid is a masterpiece of critical vision, drawing a parallel between and ultimately synthesizing familial abuse and the hysterical effects induced from living in a world shaped by corporate monopolies. Have you ever heard a child tell a story? Where they tell you, “And then this happened… and then this happened… and then this happened?” That is precisely the method writer-director-producer Ari Aster uses to extrapolate Beau’s dithering yet vibrant consciousness; he guides us through cities and jungles of hyperbolic occurrences, leaving us at once unsure of whether anything we see is real, and yet utterly aware that it is all true — or at least, it is from Beau’s point of view.
Beau cannot trust anything he perceives, even as we in the audience come to realize that he must trust what he knows to be true. But he’s been gaslit by his mother and the various agents of her empire — products, programs, pills, and people alike — into doubting everything. In questioning the truth, he destabilizes his own cognitive equilibrium. He is never “safe.” Thus, he is afraid. And it is this fear that keeps him from looking at himself in another light… one in which his “guilt,” or perceived inadequacy, can be read as something else: insight.
I found it all quite difficult to watch. Yet as the end credits rolled — gently, against a lengthy final shot of an overturned boat — I started laughing. I saw Mr. Aster’s genius. He’d bombarded me with cryptic details, and then given me some time at the end to let it all sink in… to relax, and to watch the last three hours of his work bob on the surface of my consciousness. I stepped out of the theater feeling giddy — and then, looking up at a storefront, I noticed that its name, Phoenix, was lettered in the same curved font as Joaquin’s name in the closing credits. When I got in my car, and pulled out onto the highway, I was followed by a man in a blue pickup truck that had a bumper sticker warning, “Don’t trust the fake news!” He stared at me just as several men stared at Beau in the movie. And when I reached the very intersection where the cop car had finally left me the night before, another cop car appeared from the same direction in which its twin had departed and tailed me for a few miles.
It’s all an illusion. It’s all out to get us, and none of it is. Beau Is Afraid is here to remind us that our lives are shaped by forces out of our control. So calm down, be virtuous, and always take your pills with water.
