BEAU IS AFRAID: The Guilty Remains of a Mad Genius

There’s something inherently funny about studio A24 winning most of the major Oscars last year with a handful of crowd pleasers and having their next major release be an audaciously exhausting three-hour Freudian comedy-epic starring Joaquin Phoenix as essentially impotent Oedipus off his Xanax, helmed by the studio’s former prodigal son who is already being called Judas by many of his worshipers and haters alike. Much like Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon from last year, this is what uncompromised auteurist vision can look like with the right studio support, for better and worse. Ari Aster‘s Beau is Afraid is an aggressive, arguably juvenile film that throws everything at the wall, and even if not all of it always sticks, it’s a sight to behold and truly needs to be seen to be believed (and/or scoffed at).

Aster Hours

Beau is best summarized as a comedy in 4 distinct acts, the first of which has much more in common with Martin Scorsese‘s After Hours than any horror film, a genre Aster is most tied to (though, this label is one that even Aster himself disagrees with: he’s a genre filmmaker if anything, less of a horror one). From there, we descend deeper into Beau’s guilt-ridden psyche as well as the vivid, upside-down America that Aster and team have created. To say any more about the plot or story direction would be a shame and disservice as more than most other films of the past few years, this really is one where the less you know going in the better.

After two very critically and financially successful features, Aster decided to not follow in the footsteps of his successes and instead went ahead and made his most sporadic and eclectic film yet. It’s also by far his funniest. To name just a few of its inspirations: there are moments that feel straight up Tati with every background character being a vessel for a very elaborate gag, an entire Karel Zemen-inspired sequence as the film’s centerpiece, and Phoenix‘s performance harkens back to Jack Nance‘s in Eraserhead: both are sort of as if you plucked Chaplin out of a comedy farce and threw him into a nightmarish pit of confusion though in this case, you add a dose of a diagnosed anxiety disorder and twenty first century dread to the mix. The influences are clear and this is Aster playing up his best and worst indulgences, all seemingly on purpose, and it’s up to the individual viewer to decide if it’s just a hollow mess with an identity crisis or a glorious amalgamation of the inspirations that came before, like a mad scientist adding his favorite ingredients to a potion. In this reviewer’s mind, however, it’s wholeheartedly the latter.

Concerning The Birthday Boy Stab Man

The world of Beau Is Afraid is perhaps one of the most vivid of the last couple of years featured in a major motion picture. It’s a hilariously terrifying (or terrifyingly hilarious?) warped view of how America is and where it’s headed amped up to twenty-five. Aster uses this backdrop, however, less as a harsh, in-depth critique of the status of our falling or fallen country and more as a mere backdrop to throw Beau and his twisted, guilt-ridden mind into. The world of the film is populated with many wacky characters throughout such as a drama troupe who wear humorously constructed animal costumes, an eccentric family (played marvelously by Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, and Kylie Rogers), who helps and/or kidnaps Beau, and a naked man who runs around stabbing people. It’s a mean world Aster and team created here but also a humorously oblique one but the rich and inherently stupid universe of the film is one of its greatest strengths.

It’s not quite all jokes though as Aster attempts to balance the balls-to-the-wall insanity of it all with brief moments of cathartic ruminations on grief, love, and a bit of loneliness but these moments act as more emotional footnotes and they mainly work. Particularly with a subplot involving Beau’s long lost adolescent love, a subplot that begins with genuinely touching, if a little off kilter, moments of sweet awkwardness. Of course, given the film this is, this subplot bubbles as the film goes on and bursts with later scenes featuring the memorable Parker Posey which culminates in perhaps the most out of pocket, gloriously awkward scene in the whole piece. Apart from that, some moments of Beau dealing with his overbearing, traumatizing mother (played quite remarkably by Patti LuPone in a performance that deserves awards recognition for its Tennessee Williams-esque theatricality but will almost certainly be overlooked) work quite well emotionally and even if Beau can at times feel more like a vessel for Aster‘s pent up emotional angst and trauma instead of an actual character, they still feel most of the time.

Welcome To The Guilt Machine

Familial trauma has been a theme in pretty much every Ari Aster film, short or feature, so it’s no surprise that Beau Is Afraid feels almost like the apex of those types of themes. This is Aster at his most unhinged, not just creatively but arguably also thematically and emotionally as this feels like him squeezing the last of that family-targeted anger out of himself before he presumably moves on to different themes in his next picture. This is a screenplay with blood smears on it and love it or hate it, this feels like Aster putting all parts of himself into a script, the good with the bad. The result is messy and sometimes immature but it’s undoubtedly one from the heart.

Guilt is the primary fluid running through the veins of Beau, both the character and the film. Beau is generally a sweet guy, always over-thanking and over-apologizing, no doubt a symptom of his guilty upbringing that the film peels back layers of as it unravels. This makes him a pretty easily identifiable character as everyone has experienced a certain amount of guilt from their parents at some point, the feeling as though you owe them your life simply because they gave it to you. It’s an absurd way of thinking that many people have, consciously or subconsciously, and Aster plays around with this to the greatest of extremes, the film becoming more and more absurd as it goes along. It reaches its breaking point with a glorious climax that could only be described as operatic, a move that might be considered “jumping the shark” by some but a decision of thematic relevance to others, one that feels pretty in line with the escalating insanity of the previous few hours. While not quite as subtle with his themes as some of his contemporaries (the film doesn’t feel nearly as impenetrable as some are acting it is but that’s no criticism in the slightest), Aster wields guilt in a way that is ever-present and pretty ingenious, in a way that dare not be spoiled too much. Just when you think Beau might have defeated the guilt of his past and present, it’s back to kick him in the teeth again.

Beau Is Afraid will perhaps go down as the most divisive film of 2023. It’s madness incarnate, it’s an artist getting all the power they can muster and creating something so rich in absurdity that it might just be genius. Because of all the phallic jokes and its Homeric quest to top itself in ludicrousness, Aster‘s heart of darkness at the center of this twisted circus is what makes it all worth it. It’s scary and stupid in the way our world is scary and stupid and watching an artist like Ari Aster tapping into those guilty fears that keep us all up at night, the ones that keep us from picking up the phone, make it a real pleasure.

Beau is Afraid was released in theaters on April 14th, 2023.

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