The Reel Review
A mild-mannered, paranoid, anxiety-riddled Beau realizes his greatest fears in life when he embarks on a cross-country, Kafkaesque odyssey to visit his controlling mother, Mona. Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone and Amy Ryan star in this surrealist tragicomedy/horror that Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) wrote, directed and co-produced.
Aster’s film is a giant, surreal fever dream of Oedipal angst. The acting throughout the film – in particular, Joaquin, LuPone, Ryan, Parker Posey and Nathan Lane – is impressively committed, given such a wacky story. And some scenes are wildly creative. The first act is the strongest – featuring a perpetually unlucky Beau stumbling through his nightmarish, crime-infested neighborhood. Bodies are left lying in the street. An aggressively naked man attacks bystanders. It gets even weirder from there.
Some of the absurdist moments – the intruder positioned over Beau in the bathtub, Bill Hader as an unlucky UPS delivery guy, Parker Posey’s final scene, the discovery of what Beau’s father is, etc. – are actually quite hilarious and themselves entertaining. But ultimately there just aren’t enough of them to keep Aster’s exhausting, three-hour-long film from being an insufferable, self-indulgent bore.
REEL FACTS
• The movie begins with the logo of Beau’s mother’s Mona Wassermann corporation, a symbol that mother is always in control.
• A24 reportedly lost $35 million on this film, which was an expansion of Aster’s 2011 short, Beau.
• Ari Aster has described his film as “a Jewish Lord of the Rings, but Beau is just going to his mother’s house.”
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