On paper, Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid should be the movie that finally brings someone like me back into the flock, having me strip-mine DePop for limited edition Online Ceramics Midsommar drops to sport at a sparsely-attended screening of Nic Cage’s The Wicker Man. It’s a 179-minute act of cinematic onanism, bridling with pent-up ambition and a total disregard for the cares of the suits or the whims of the audience. I respect the hell out of people willing to cash in all of their chips and bet it all on black: The film will live on, even if your career won’t, and who knows? Maybe someone somewhere will find it worthwhile, and the risk is worth it for the furthering of film art itself. But even I have a breaking point, and Beau is Afraid is almost designed to show exactly where it is, much like Alexandre Gonzalez Innaritu’s Bardo (fuck a subtitle) was. The films are funhouse mirrors of one another: Both are concerned with the anxieties and pet sounds of their makers, though Beau is nowhere as self-righteous and strident as Innaritu’s work, because Aster demands pity for his characters, rather than tragic admiration. They’re both catalogs of sins, which makes sense, given Bardo’s purgatorial psychic setting, though where Innaritu hits every smarmy note on his way to fucking up a Fellini riff, Aster hopes an abyssal cynicism will provide fodder for laughter. Both are equally vacuous, despite their mid-film attempts at greater and broader meaning. Both are terrible, but Beau stands out as the most irritating one. Perhaps it’s because failed drama can eventually become camp, but failed comedy is just miserable for all involved.
Beau is Afraid is Aster’s attempt at a road comedy, the kind of Odyssean race that’s ballooned plenty of comedies past muffin-top chub and directly into candidacy for weight loss surgery. Its lead character, Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is a hollow man living with a creeping and crippling anxiety in the middle of LA, where nude murderers and throngs of the homeless wait to try and assault him on his way home from his therapist’s office. He’s scheduled to go visit his mother (Patti Lupone), a corporate titan who has a town named in her honor, but a confluence of bad luck prevents him from making his way to the airport. This bad luck continues, of course: his run-down apartment has a brown recluse infestation, his pills require him to take them with water, lest he die, and of course his faucets don’t work, and his neighbors, for whatever reason, hate him, even though he’s done nothing wrong. But in the process, Beau gets a phone call with the worst possible news — his mother has died in a tragic chandelier accident — and Beau, a removed if dutiful son, is devastated, clutching the little china statue of a mother and child he bought as a gift for her (and personally inscribed) as he stands, motionless, letting his grief overwhelm him.
But thanks to a lengthy home invasion that occurred the prior night, Beau is soon forced out of his apartment by a straggler, and as he runs nude across the street, fleeing a knife-wielding nude maniac and a cop who mistakes him for the man that he’s running away from, he’s hit by a car. He wakes up miles away from home, wounded from the accident and the knife of the vagrant, in the middle of a lovely suburban home. Little does he know this will kick off his adventure, which presents him with a new and outsized obstacle at each step as he makes his way home to bury his mother. He’ll spend time with a doting couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) and their angry teenaged daughter who believes that Beau has brought in to replace her dead brother, and be pursued by the veteran that lives in a camper van on their lawn. He’ll meet a theater troupe, buried in the woods, whose members put on pastoral performances about the nature of life itself. He’ll reconnect with his oldest love (Parker Posey, whose third-act valiance nearly makes the film work for a bit), and, finally, make his way home to confront his demons and the relationship that defined his life.
Now, it should go without saying that one doesn’t need a protagonist to be an active force in their own life to wring out a story (The Dude, a character, abides). Indeed, Aster’s primary motivation as a horror filmmaker is to craft the perfect victim of circumstance. Hereditary and Midsommar have layers of insulation separating the viewer from this fact: The former has an ensemble large enough to fan enough torment and suffering across a family-style combo of catastrophes, and the latter has a sense of vengeful righteousness in how Dani goes on to give the unjust actions of the Scandinavian cult her approval. Nothing is ever anyone’s fault, even the climactic car accident that sets Hereditary’s collapse into motion. The family is set up for Paimon’s machinations and, ultimately, his possession of the eldest son by unseen grandparents, while Dani is merely steered into the breach by her parents’ deaths and her boyfriend’s research trip. They are passive repositories for fate, whose hopelessness in the face of their predestined endings and the threadbare characterization that Aster endows them with are the reason it felt on point when someone made a Sims mod for Hereditary. There’s nothing to love or to hate about these characters: they’re just kindling for stately compositions.
Beau takes this helplessness and multiplies it without any additions beyond Aster’s curdled attempts at comedy, all of which are of the same vintage of an average viral Adult Swim short from 2014, minus the creativity and the brevity. Beau isn’t so much a character as he is a collection of anxieties, and it’s a testament to Phoenix’s skill as an actor that he makes anything within the three-hour runtime feel close to human. Indeed, the tension between Phoenix’s natural charisma and Aster’s scattershot writing makes the film, for seconds interspersed once every half-hour, interesting. There’s always some amount of possibility with Phoenix that the man might do something surprising even in dire circumstances (Joker is a prime example of this), but this is an Ari Aster picture, so we’re reminded of his heavy authorial hand at every turn, as if a painter covered a finished canvas in his signature as to totally obscure the image. Even that rhetorical example sounds more complex and provocative than Beau is in practice. And to be fair, it is his passion project, so self-indulgence is the raison d’etre, but Aster’s skillset as a filmmaker isn’t built for this kind of opus: it was honed in shorts and embraced by the arthouse-adjacent masses in visually-appealing horror films, each of which had a hook beyond “Hey, there’s four versions of this actor on the poster!”
What Beau is will be debated heavily by critics and audiences in the weeks and months to come, but my thesis is this: It is a creatively bankrupt realization of the brand of deep-seated nihilism that Aster mistakes for meaningful tragedy. His cinematic worlds have always been overly constructed fetish objects — it’s why most of the memorable action in his prior works takes place in closed locales, be it a family home or a forest-nestled commune — but the broadness here robs him of his sanctuaries, and the scope of the film means that he can’t ignore the world outside his window. And what we see of this world is one that resembles our own, though presented by someone who decides to cut their Fox News rage diet with a healthy amount of NPR despair. Beau’s apartment, placed in the middle of Skid Row despite plenty of narrative reasons for him not to be there, feels like it was ripped out of a Chesa Boudin recall ad, only to be tempered by the stale and bitter critique of fallen-soldier bereavement as embodied by Lane and Ryan’s characters.
What few idyllic pastures remained are soon spoiled by Beau’s buffoonish causality, which also play out as thorny insults to any sort of aspirational third-way of life outside of the traditional walls of capitalism. If any of this were funny, perhaps it’d be able to justify its miseries, but in Aster’s hands, it just becomes a putrid mirror endowed with the same bleakness as your late-stage Aronofsky flick. It’s fundamentally Calvinist in a strange way, and one can imagine Oliver Cromwell’s piked head nodding in agreement as Beau makes his way to damnation. The flaw is in his birth and there’s little he can do to change the outcome — the evidence for his worth will always be lacking. Aster resents Beau as much as he indulges him, and as such we never get a sense of his worth: He’s just a punching bag, but even a well-worn Everlast eventually accumulates some kind of meaning.
The Ligottian nature of this worldview (which feels more appropriate than a Kafka comparison, despite their flights into nightmarish fantasy) when factored in with the way Beau’s fears are always quickly confirmed and justified, betrays a paranoid narcissism at the film’s core, as if a cinematic priest ripped out The Truman Show’s heart to ensure that The Idol will rise on HBO after Cannes this year. Beau is nothing if not burdened — with his fears of the poor outside his window, with a pair of testes that hang too low, with his mother’s love — and those burdens are the only thing sustaining the mass. The world doesn’t just revolve around him in the way that it does for every character-centric narrative, it only exists to torment him for having been born. It’s the vanity of the unfounded existential panic attack stripped of its key terror: That one knows that their fears aren’t real, and that the things in their head aren’t really tormenting them. Imagine a nervous child seizing up on the pavement, terrified that if he does step on a cracked section of concrete, he really will cause his mother to shatter some vertebrae. That is pitiable and relatable — the kid, understandably, hasn’t grown enough to separate superstition from reality, and also isn’t cognizant that they alone don’t have the omniscient power to influence these events, nor do others. Beau sees this and crafts a scenario in which not only does the boy have that power, but that someone conspired to set up his fall in the first place in order to conduct a moral test he’s guaranteed to fail.
Again, this fatalism has always been present in Aster’s work, but its tempering has been the key to his success with audiences, the stately and precise execution of the protagonist’s fate endowing their plight with an amusing Rube Goldberg-style causation. That clockwork precision is missing from Beau, as it was in Midsommar, but there’s no winsome aesthetic to charm our way into appreciating this kind of tragicomedy. Aster falls back on what he knows: That nude old people are creepy and/or funny, that suburbia is weird, that the forest and those who retreat to it are mystical and strange. It wears thin over the course of three solid hours, and it’s made only more difficult by its paradoxical hyperactivity. Things are always moving, even when the film is trying to pump the brakes for atmospheric development, and despite Phoenix’s best efforts, it never coheres into a character piece. Events happen at random, his character remains static, and the tonal result is more frustrating causation than, say, a blighting intrusive thought hitting someone mid-panic.
When the film does finally just come out and try to prod us into a big and overwhelming laugh, right at its climax, it lands with a thud, having worn everyone out so thoroughly that even something as ridiculous as the ultimate reveal is rendered limp. All this chaos for so few results beyond some sort of neo-Freudian statement of despair and impotence after the bleakness of Aster’s perspective runs aground after three hours of treading in shallow waters.