If you are acclaimed as a "visionary" director, sooner or later, someone will pay you to realize your visions. Freed from the ordinary constraints that impede free expression in the motion picture industry, the visionary gets to put his obsessions on film. The result is usually catastrophic. David Lynch, undoubtedly a visionary, was able to finance Lost Highway and the even more rebarbative Inland Empire -- both films in which his obsessions were laid bare for all the world to see. Griffith persuaded people to let him make Intolerance. Michael Cimino foundered with Heaven's Gate. The profoundly capitalist enterprise of movie-making financed Bernardo Bertolucci's mammoth 1900, a film with more red flags than Kremlin square. All of these pictures were labors of love but profoundly flawed, self-indulgent and, in some cases, well-nigh unwatchable. To these follies, one must add Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid, a three-hour confessional film in which the director seems to have been encouraged to work out themes lurking beneath his very effective and highly popular horror movies, Hereditary and Midsommar. Somewhere along the line, Martin Scorsese declared that Aster was a great director (I think it was in reference to Midsommar, the film that proved that Hereditary wasn't a mere fluke) and this opened the floodgates for the funding necessary to produce the epic Beaux is Afraid, a picture that features a crazed performance by no less than Joaquin Phoenix as its crazed titular protagonist. Aster is a talented horror director and his material is clearly motivated by certain obsessions, but it's probably a bad idea to encourage him to dramatize those obsessions in free, improvisatory form without the constraints of a genre plot. Ask yourself: would you like to explore the obsessions of Tod Browning (Freaks) for instance or David Cronenberg or, for that matter, even the relatively urbane James Whale (The Bride of Frankenstein)? -- there are certain dark crannies that it's best not to investigate and, on the evidence of Beau is Afraid, Ari Aster's personal nightmares are very dark indeed, but, also, like most people's intimate fetishes, more or less ridiculous to the point of seeming comical. I'm not trying to persuade you to not to invest three hours in this picture; I'm just providing fair warning -- but, I suppose, the double negative here is, more or less, indicative.
For all of its arduous huffing and puffing, Beau is Afraid is the ultimate Jewish Mother movie. Here the monster is Beau's insanely demanding mother, a female executive named Mona Wasserman. (Many years ago, Woody Allen made a short picture called Oedipus Wrecks in which a passive-aggressive Jewish mother grows to the size of Godzilla and tears down half of Manhattan. Aster's picture is three hours of the same content.) The picture begins with a blurry colors shot through a sack of amniotic fluid -- this is Beau's birth, accompanied by his mother's shrill screams and recriminations; no sooner is the poor bastard born but his mother commences tormenting him. At the film's end, Beau rides a rowboat with a little puttering outboard motor across some more turbulent fluid, entering a vaginal grotto of ragged-looking cliffs and, then, emerging from this stony birth canal into a vast womb-shaped auditorium, with thousands of spectators lining the walls, where he is tried, apparently somewhere in his mother's uterus for crimes against her (the prosecuting attorney is none other than the famously Semitic Richard Kind who rails at poor Beau from a tribune high above this watery Circus Maximus). Of course, Beau is duly convicted; his little rowboat's motor bursts into flame and explodes and he sinks into the black ooze, apparently ensconced in his mother's womb. The underside of the rowboat bobs on the fluid like the coffin at the end of Moby Dick -- it's passive-aggressive mother as the Great White Whale. This will give you some idea of what this picture is like.
Beaux plans to visit his mother. But an elaborate and very funny series of mishaps keep him from making his plane. (We have seen him with his therapist and it is clear that he dreads this trip.) When he calls his mother to apologize for being late, a UPS worker informs him that he's in Mona Wasserman's house and that the woman is dead and headless to boot -- a chandelier has fallen on her and caused her "head to evaporate." The rest of the movie chronicles Beau's attempts to get to his mother's house said to be six hours away from the hellish city in which the hero lives. Here are some spoilers, but frankly I don't give a damn -- you aren't likely to watch this movie in the first place. As it turns out, Beau's mother has faked her own death (a twist always signaled by headless corpses or bodies burned beyond recognition). In fact, she has beheaded her longtime housekeeper in exchange for paying the woman's family a king's ransom in cash. This scheme is devised to test Beau's loyalty and as a punishment for his failure to visit her in a timely fashion. At the bizarre mansion where Mona lives, Beau encounters a girl that he desired in his childhood -- she's now middle-aged. Beau has sex with the woman whom his orgasm kills. All the while, Mom has been lurking in the wings watching the proceedings. She harangues Beau in a lengthy speech ranting about what a bad son he has been. She also introduces Beau to his father who is a penis-monster with spider legs and fangs concealed in his mother's attic. (Beau has long expected that there is some sort of horror in the attic but it turns out to be worse than he thought.) After the penis-monster is slain in a gory battle with a traumatized war veteran, a berserker driven mad by the Battle of Caracas, Beau confronts mom. It turns out that his therapist is working for Mona and he has recorded all of their sessions in which Beau is said to "have scapegoated his mother" for her inspection. Some choice examples of these sessions are played to Beau's horror. He, then, tries to strangle his mother (at long last) -- but this fails and he ends up on the slow boat to mom's vagina and uterus where the picture ends.
There's much, much more in the movie, some of it very brilliantly done, other parts vapid to the point of being unwatchable. Aster is a horror director by trade and the movie is chockful of ghastly stabbings, semi-eviscerations, and all sorts of gore. In summary, the movie is designed in five acts: the first act takes place in and around Beau's nightmarish apartment; the second act involves Beau's convalescence after he is repeatedly stabbed and hit by a motor vehicle, he's in captivity in the leafy enclave of the suburb where the negligent driver who almost killed him (the wife of a surgeon) lives. The third act, which is endless and completely obscure, involves a theater company that puts on subliterate plays in the woods -- the play performed here turns out to be the story of Beau's life and his pursuit of his missing father (who seems to show up in a form more benign than the penis-monster avatar in the audience at the sylvan theater.) In the fourth act, Beau finally has sex and confronts his mother. The fifth act is the trial in the watery amphitheater of Mona's womb. Much of this material is overtly ridiculous but the film is shot with such virtuosic expertise that it's hard to laugh at the idiotically melodramatic stuff on the screen. By far, the best part of the movie is its' first hour. Beau lives in a ramshackle tenement in a hellish city where everyone on the street is always raping and murdering everyone else. His therapist has given him an anti-anxiety pill that he must always take with water or run the risk of dying. His apartment building is infested with brown recluse spiders according to posters all over the walls. The streets are perilous -- crowded with prostitutes and horrible-looking beggars (one of them is bent double and flops his arms around like pendulums) and people are either bleeding out or having sex on the asphalt. The apartment is not any better. After Beau dines on a micro-wave dinner (a combination of flavors from Hawaii and Ireland it says on the box), he goes to bed. But every hour, Beau receives notes thrust under his door telling him to be quiet -- although he hasn't said a word and has made no noise at all. Around three a.m., the neighbor retaliating for Beau's alleged noise-making puts on some kind of awful techno-rock so loud that it knocks things off the hero's walls. As a result Beau oversleeps and misses his flight to see his mother, necessitating a painful call to her -- she viciously denounces him. When he calls back, he finds that mom is dead, sans head. Beau is frantic and takes his anti-anxiety pill, but finds that none of the water spigots in the ramshackle apartment are working. When he leaves the apartment to get water, his keys get stuck in his door and are stolen. So he's locked out of this apartment with the sinister pill corroding his innards. Beau takes a phone book and uses it to prop open the door to the nightmare apartment. He dashes through the chaos on the streets to a bodega next to a hideous sex shop. But he doesn't have the correct change to buy the $1.79 bottle of water and is detained. While arguing with the clerk in the store, the entire mob on the street find the door open to the apartment and stream into the place. But Beau is locked-out. He climbs a scaffolding to look into his apartment and sees the miscreants from the street partying hearty with his stuff -- some of the freaks seem to be preparing one of their fellows for supper (they are seasoning him); but others are politely doing the dishes. Beau spends the night on the scaffolding outside his apartment. The next day, he fights his way back to his rooms and finds that one of the street people, a man who is grotesquely tattooed lying dead in the hallway. Beau steps over the bloody corpse and draws a bath. While bathing, he sees to his horror that one of the bums from the street is hanging from the ceiling over the tub. A brown recluse is skittering over the bum's face. The man shrieks and falls on top of the naked Beau. After a wrestling match in the bathtub, Beau runs naked out into the street where a cop aims his service firearm at him and tells him that he will shoot unless he drops the weapon. What weapon? Beau is buck-naked. Just as the cop is about to shoot him, Beau flees into traffic gets hit by a car and, then, repeatedly knifed by another naked street bum called the "Birthday Boy." This frenzied, nightmare slapstick is the best part of the movie and once you have enjoyed this mayhem, it's best to tune out of the movie for the next ninety minutes or so. You will miss the scenes with Beau's benefactors, an insane suburban couple whose son died in the aforementioned Battle of Caracas. (The family has a jigsaw puzzle made from a picture of the dead Marine that they assiduously piece together; Jeeves, the dead Marine's combat buddy is living in an Airstream trailer a few yards away and periodically runs amuck.) Beau's surgeon wants to correct his "distended testicles", a result it seems of Beau's fear that if he ever ejaculates, he will die -- this intelligence is one of her mother's kind gifts to her son. The scenes involving the arboreal theater company develop another plot -- Beau's search for his father; in the play, Beau is shown to be a father himself and has three sons. The play features a live-action Beau strolling about in a cartoon, a bit like an infernal Disney picture in which flesh-and-blood characters interact with perky animated birds in a colorful painted landscape -- this part of the movie probably makes sense in some way, but I wasn't able to decipher the animated thirty minutes in the middle of the picture. After these adventures, Beau finally makes it to his mother's house and the film's grim denouement.
Joaquin Phoenix is very good, but mostly has to stand motionless, his eyes dilated in rapt horror. This shot is Aster's trademark, a character looking at the camera in speechless ecstatic terror -- but a little bit of this goes a long way. There's an extraordinary scene in which Beau embraces his lost three sons (fictional apparitions from the play within the movie); he gropes at them and everyone sheds hot tears and it's weirdly affecting. Scenes on a cruise ship, a flashback to when Beau was about 13, establish the movie's love interest, the woman with whom he has fatal sex in his mother's house near the end of the movie. These scenes are also very good with a dense tincture of foreboding and dread. (Aster can stage horror effectively in bright daylight.) Indeed, the whole movie is a symphony of dread and foreboding. But it's also a comically self-indulgent mess.
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