Beau is Afraid

BEAU IS AFRAID   ***

Ari Aster

2023

IDEA:  Wracked with guilt and paranoia, a middle-aged man gets repeatedly waylaid as he tries to make it home to visit his mother.

BLURB:  When Beau is Afraid opens with a subjective, in-utero sequence of the titular character’s birth – accompanied by violent wailing and a mix of indistinguishable, gutturally nightmarish sounds – it doesn’t take profound hermeneutic skills to know where this thing is going. Over the ensuing three hours, Ari Aster will grotesquely, sardonically, and extravagantly chart the aftermath of that originary trauma, which is, simply put, the trauma of being alive. He will send Joaquin Phoenix’s chronically fearful Beau on a tragicomic picaresque into the recesses of his psyche as he tries to clamber out of recrudescent childhood traumas and the derangements of everyday life so he can stop the madness by returning home, to his mother, to the womb. Thematically predictable as it is, and by its shriller, less inspired third act, exhaustingly tautological (did you get the mommy issues and the Jewish guilt?), the film’s circuitous narrative shape and vividly imagined dystopian world provide a surfeit of surprises. Aster’s direction is thrilling, in both raucous set-pieces (the spectacularly squirmy comedy of errors that makes up the urban section) and quieter moments (the slow dollying long takes of Phoenix’s face as he contemplates his fiascos). As a tumid odyssey of a man’s emotional, psychological, and sexual constipation, Beau is Afraid evokes everyone from Freud and Philip Roth to the Coen brothers and Charlie Kaufman. These and other influences swirl into what amounts to less of a character exploration than a bold conceptual gambit, an Oedipal drama transformed into florid, demented screen psychotherapy.