Beau is Afraid
Beau is middle aged and lives alone in a near-derelict block of apartments in a neighbourhood of selfish, cruel and dangerous people. A customary sloucher who is permanently anxious, the television reminding him that the “Birthday Boy Stab Man” has now attacked twenty-eight people, his therapist offers him a new prescription to help him cope with his imminent visit to his demanding mother Mona on the anniversary of the death of the father he never knew.
Instead, a sequence of events sees Beau having his luggage stolen, receiving the news that his mother has been killed in a freak accident, locked out of his building as his apartment is ransacked and trashed, a lurking stranger almost drowning him in his own bathtub, a confrontation with a policeman who almost shoots him and a collision with a truck, fortunately driven by kindly Grace and her surgeon husband Roger who take him in.
Director Ari Aster’s first two films Hereditary and Midsommar both having dealt with the death of parents, siblings or children and the resulting trauma, he continues in the family way with Beau is Afraid, an uncomfortable portrait of the stagnant life of Beau Isaac Wassermann (Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix as an adult and Armen Nahapetian in the flashbacks to his unconventional childhood), a small, unimportant man powerless in the storms of life as he attempts to make his way to his mother’s delayed funeral.
Badgered by her attorney who with the demise of Mona (Patti LuPone in the present and Zoe Lister-Jones in the past) inherited the duty of haranguing and belittling him, Beau is Afraid walks a long and slow path of absurdity and torment, a tragicomedy with the emphasis heavily on the tragedy, Beau needing constant support and medication to function even when not incapacitated, unable to even make simple decisions.
His life overshadowed by his monstrous mother whose company built the apartment block in which he lives and made the ready meals he eats, even the microwave he heats them in, the theme of absent, indifferent or bad parents echoes throughout the film, in Grace and Roger’s spiteful daughter who is unable to control her impulses despite her heavy medication, in the wandering theatre troupe who call themselves the Orphans of the Forest who invite Beau to participate in a parable to reshape his broken and empty life.
An illuminating play within a play of a life which might have been, it is one of the more magical of the many digressions which stretch Beau is Afraid to three unnecessary and increasingly frustrating hours, with scenes stretched as thin as the celestial vapours at the heat death of the universe before a shift occurs with the passage through a darkened tunnel to an arena of judgement of Gilliamesque prosecution and proportion, Aster indulging himself with meanderings of bleak whimsy when precision would sharpen the impact of his work.
Beau is Afraid is currently on general release
