Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023) (Patreon)

I will admit right off the bat, I am glad this film exists, despite my deep ambivalence towards it. In an industry, to say nothing of a broader culture, that is so seduced by risk-averse financial strategy and pixel-level administration and squeezing creative people out of the creative process so as to add another five bucks to the bottom line, I want more films like Beau Is Afraid. It isn't sloppy, exactly. Ari Aster is an artist who probably evinces an absolute control of the medium simply by restricting his choices to things he can accomplish well. What Beau Is Afraid is is profligate. It is conceptually and financially wasteful. It seemingly has no shame.

Which is odd, because its narrative, such as it is, centers on a man who is nothing but shame. Beau (Summer Phoenix's less talented brother Joaquin) is so reactive and cowed and top-to-bottom Oedipalized that he's barely a character at all.. Either by failure or by design, Beau is an empty space where a protagonist should be. In a more predictable film, his inability to make choices or flex the slightest muscle of subjectivity would be easily explained. He's a nepo baby, the son of a rich industrialist who has never wanted for anything, and so has no real desires, expect perhaps to be left alone.

But that's not even remotely the sort of film Beau Is Afraid is. Interesting sidenote: apparently the working title for this film was Disappointment Blvd. That's funny, because how could Beau be disappointed? He never expects anything but the worst, and the worst is what he inevitably, implausibly receives. I joked on Twitter that Aster treats Freudian psychoanalysis as if it were tentpole-movie IP, and that this is the best and worst thing about the film. That's because the crises that have formed Beau, and are his undoing, are so on-the-nose as to be preposterous. But only in the same way that donning a cape and flying is preposterous. Beau Is Afraid is the picaresque journey of a walking negative archetype.

His masculinity has been thwarted, not only because his sexy, overbearing, powerful mother (Patti LuPone, stellar) is sexy, overbearing, and powerful. As if to gild the lily (or in actuality, to nip it in the bud), his mommy Mona Wasserman has instilled something quite close to literal castration anxiety in her son, convincing him that, as a genetic trait of the men in his line, he will instantly die of heart failure should he every achieve orgasm. No petit mort for Beau; only the fatal abyss of nothingness. In a sly bit of trickery, it turns out that Beau's damaged ego was concealing Toxic Masculinity all along (RIP, Parker Posey), a fatal AR-15 of ejaculate that Mommy was only trying to keep locked away from the world.

To say that Beau doesn't hang together as a movie, much less a narrative, is possibly redundant. A three-hour tour cloven in almost perfect thirds, there is nothing resembling continuity, save the ongoing hollow-manliness of Beau. (I toyed with the idea that the three acts roughly corresponded to the superego, the ego, and the id, with Beau finally slaying the mother as the final Oedipal boss-level, after which there's nothing to do but die in ignominy. But I'm not ready to commit to that interpretation, and besides, nothing in this film is that oblique. If Aster were thinking along those lines, by god, he'd let us know.) The first act depicts a sort of Fox News nightmare of urban life, an ethnic war zone where only the lumpy white guy is in genuine peril. But when Beau is recuperating in the white-flight suburbs with creepy Roger (Nathan Lane) and Grace (Amy Ryan), we get the distinct sense that Aryan hetero-bonhomie is deadlier than homelessness.

The most poignant part of Beau Is Afraid is also its more disposable, the theater troupe in the woods mounting a production of Beau's own self-image, as a good man beset by random acts of god. The Wolf House guys make something very special, displaying a level of craft and sincerity unlike anything else in the film. But it tells us little, and in no way prepares us for Beau's sort-of homecoming. When Beau is forced to meet the Father, there is nothing left to do but lash out against his ball-busting mother who, hidden away in the attic, literally possesses the Phallus. There's not much logic in the finale, where Beau, having seemingly dispatched Evil Mommy, floats on a canoe into the Culvert of Ultimate Destiny. How did we get here? By the time the credits roll, and the assembled spectators onscreen start filing out, it's clear that Aster wants to cuck the moviegoer as well, denying us the Happy Ending that Mona denied Beau. Aster is on the side of Mommy-Power, and that is a good way to induce what I can only call CinemaScope hysteria. "A24 should be dissolved as a company," fuck yeah, the Medusa is laughing her ass off.