Some things you might hear your fellow moviegoers say at the end of Beau Is Afraid include: “What the fuck did we just watch?”; “Movies are back!”; “He’s a weird guy;” and “There’s definitely going to be some good Reddit posts from this.”
At least, those were some of the things I overheard as the lights turned on after an opening-night screening of Ari Aster’s new, three-hour-long Oedipal odyssey. Beau is the sort of film that lends itself to such varied responses—and, yes, to Reddit deep-dives. The movie is, well, a lot of things: an epic adventure, a Freudian freak-out, a guilt trip, a drug trip, a grief journal, and perhaps most of all, a gleefully juvenile comedy. Beau is pretentious, indulgent, and weird. It is also broadly entertaining, masterfully made, and undeniably funny. What happens? A lot. But also... who really knows?
Beau begins with its titular character’s birth, and in some ways that’s the film’s most lucid, literal moment. From there, we find a rumpled and pallid 48-year-old Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) in therapy, worrying about getting cancer from drinking mouthwash. Though, that turns out to be a secondary concern. The more pressing worry is that this is the eve of Beau’s father’s death—and he’s supposed to visit his mother the following day. The world Beau enters upon leaving therapy is a Kaufman-esque circus of danger and destruction. Pedestrians urge a suicidal man to jump off a tall building. A naked killer named Birthday Boy Stab Man is on the loose. Notes appear under Beau’s door in the middle of the night requesting that he lower his nonexistent music. Is Beau’s universe always this way? Is this scary surreality simply a reflection of his homecoming angst? Maybe the “very cool new drug” his therapist prescribed is causing him to hallucinate?
The film encourages multiple interpretations—both about what’s happening and what it’s trying to do. Because of Aster’s history with horror, some will argue that Beau is, at its core, existing within that genre. Indeed, it features callbacks to the terrors of Hereditary (decapitation) and Midsommar (a falling body goes splat), as well as offering many fresh frights of its own (attics, intercourse, a psychotic combat veteran named Jeeves). But in Beau, Aster shifts the balance so that those bits of violence are played mostly for laughs. The premise itself—a modern Greek tragedy about a man’s harrowing journey… to visit his mother—is the sort of joke at the heart of many Woody Allen and Albert Brooks comedies. In that tradition of Jewish humor, the film excels.
As much as Joaquin Phoenix plays the sad-sack neurotic for pathos, he also gives some hangdog facial reactions and faint-hearted line readings that had me howling. Aster allows the rest of the cast to be more explicitly funny. There’s a palpable sense that the director had seasoned character actors such as Nathan Lane, Richard Kind, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Parker Posey in mind while writing. Lane milks every dad-ish “My dude” the script hands him, McKinley Henderson delivers some of his best mischievous smirks, and Posey’s big scene is a near lock for the funniest movie moment of the year.
But Aster’s ambitions are clearly greater than simply getting guffaws. This movie, lest you forget (and, to its credit, you might), is nearly as long as Magnolia and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King—two movies it has in mind for different reasons. Beau’s voyage is more or less broken into chapters, each one allowing Aster and his first-rate art department (hats off to production designer Fiona Crombie) to create distinct, highly detailed worlds. The standout, though, comes mid-movie, when a woodland play transports Beau to a magical mystery universe full of flat sets and bright animation courtesy of Chilean filmmakers Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cosiña. This, you might imagine, is what The Wizard of Oz would’ve looked like if it was told from the Cowardly Lion’s point of view—and, you know, if the Cowardly Lion was a middle-aged Jewish man.
More contemporarily, though, the film’s exuberant maximalism calls to mind Everything Everywhere All at Once (which, incidentally, edged out Aster’s Hereditary as A24’s biggest-ever box office success last year). Like Everything Everywhere, Beau is rich in weighty themes, colorful stimuli, aesthetic virtuosity, and penis jokes. Together, I saw the two films as a culmination, or maybe just a beginning, of a certain kind of elevated comedy. But they also are reflections—in their relentless noisiness and reality-bending absurdity—of the social media-fueled anxiety that is so rampant right now.
That said, mommy issues are timeless. As are fears of death and the failure to launch. These are subjects that, to varying degrees, have surfaced in Aster’s previous films. The difference in Beau is that Aster’s deployment of them won’t produce nightmares so much as clue you in to his own. I can’t think of an artist whose major magazine profile I’m more actively anticipating. In the meantime, though, consider Beau an enormously fun—if also mind-boggling and head-spinning—trip through his twisted subconscious.