Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours
Director: Felix Van Groeningen
Quick Impressions:
During the end credits of Beautiful Boy, we hear Timothée Chalamet read Charles Bukowski’s poem “Let it Enfold You” in its entirety. As I listened appreciatively, part of me wished we had come in (very) late and caught only this part of the film. It’s by far the best part of Beautiful Boy, and apparently showcasing a single aspect of Chalamet over the end credits is the latest craze in prestige pictures. In Call Me By Your Name, we got to stare at Chalamet’s crying face. Here, we listen to his melodic voice.
After seeing this performance, I think Chalamet has a decent shot at actually winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. My main reason for thinking this is that I spent every moment of the movie when Chalamet was absent waiting and hoping for him to be on the screen again. His performance as (now recovering) meth addict Nic Sheff elevates the film. Following his strong work last year, I do think Chalamet could win this time. (Then again, I’ve been wrong before. Just a few weeks ago in my review of A Simple Favor, I was sure Lady Gaga would win Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy at the Golden Globes, but as it turns out, the film is competing as a drama! Even Les Misérables competed as a comedy because of the music, so this news truly surprised me.)
Anyway, the rest of the film isn’t as good as Chalamet’s performance (or Bukowski’s poem) and it’s an onerous torture to watch. I always like Steve Carell. (I don’t trust the humanity of anyone who doesn’t.) Maura Tierney usually makes me smile (because my mother hated her character on ER so much for reasons I could never quite pin down.) And Amy Ryan is talented for sure. (I loved her in Gone Baby Gone.) But we watched this movie entirely because Chalamet might get an Oscar nomination, and he had better, because we could have watched Colette which looked a lot more fun.
The Good:
In the very opening scene, Carell’s character, David Sheff, tells a doctor that his eighteen-year-old son Nic is addicted to crystal meth. We then flash back to a year earlier when David first became aware of his son’s problems and spend the next two hours watching Nic alternate between rehab and relapse while David looks on in torment, essentially as powerless over this demoralizing cycle as the movie audience.
So if all the rainy fall weather lately has got you down, this is the wrong movie to see for a pick me up.
As a parent, the film is hard to watch. It was eerily easy to map ourselves onto the movie characters because we are also a blended family. My stepson is fifteen, and we also have a younger son and a daughter and a minivan. This family is practically us except that we don’t have any dogs, and our son is not on crystal meth. Yet. That we know of.
I mean, our son is not a drug addict, but that’s the unsettling thing about these types of movies. No parent ever says, “I know one thing for sure! My kid is going to grow up to be a drug addict.” Most people don’t see this kind of thing coming. Even the family in the film doesn’t realize the extent of Nic’s problem right away.
And whether your children have a drug problem or not, the fact remains that eventually, they turn eighteen, and move out, and you lose control over them (control that was largely illusory in the first place, perhaps, but still, it’s unsettling). This movie is loaded with flashbacks. They keep us consistently off balance because we’re never sure at the beginning of a scene precisely when it’s taking place. And if you’re like my husband, they’ll also keep you weighed down with nostalgic longing. Whether our kids take meth or not, they begin as beings completely dependent on us and slowly slip further and further from our control (sphere of influence even). One minute your little boy is boarding a plane dragging his Hello Kitty Suitcase behind him (I love that this kid has a Hello Kitty Suitcase, by the way), and the next he’s all grown up and not answering his phone.
The relationship between Karen (Maura Tierney) and Nick interested me to an unusual degree because I have a teenage stepson, too. I often think how lucky I am because mine is the sweetest, kindest young man, considerate and helpful, so loving and fun and never causing any kind of trouble. I mean, he’s a normal kid. He’s not a saint. But I frequently think that if my stepson had had the temperament of his three-year-old brother, life would have been so much the more difficult for me. (It’s the three-year-old whose adolescence I worry about, honestly. He has a temper and a violent streak, and I hear his biological mother has bipolar disorder.) My husband also found it easy to sympathize with Carell’s character, the caring dad, honestly too easy for his comfort. This is a distressing scenario to imagine. Parents always want to help their kids, and sometimes you just can’t.
Beautiful Boy is unusual in that it’s based on not one but two memoirs. (After the film, I joked to my husband that it felt like it was adapted from a hundred memoirs, the way it dragged on and on. The runtime is only two hours, but trust me, it feels like ten. This feels longer than the new Blade Runner.)
The father’s memoir is called Beautiful Boy, the son’s Tweak. I haven’t read either, but I got more of the father’s point of view from the film. Knowing going in that the story was based in part on Nic’s own writing made it an easier watch for me than for my husband, though. I knew Nic had to live to write a memoir. My husband was frustrated with the increasingly depressing storyline and beginning to despair of any hope for Nic’s recovery.
It’s a depressing film. The soundtrack features all kinds of great songs, though. I mean, we’ve heard them before, but they all have such wonderful (in some cases profound) lyrics. In a sense, the soundtrack is more focused and purposeful than the rest of the movie.
The performances are all very good, too. Chalamet will almost certainly get an Oscar nomination (based on the competition I’ve seen so far), and I suppose Carell could, too, possibly. (It doesn’t really seem too likely, but maybe.) (Probably not.) Chalamet definitely has screen presence. Watching, I kept thinking, “What a pity that they cast Joaquin Phoenix as a young Joker because this is the guy you want in a Joker origin story.”
Amy Ryan has a very small part and manages to do a staggering amount with it. She tells us so much about her character and her dynamic with her son just with the way she abruptly starts crying, then stops when rebuked. That’s the most insight into the character we get, and it’s probably far more than we’d get with someone else in the part.
Maura Tierney is good, too, but until her big moment behind the wheel, she doesn’t get to express the intensity of her feelings outwardly. (I absolutely love her art, though. Is that the stepmother’s real work?)
I recognized Stefanie Scott from A.N.T. Farm, though it took me forever to place her.
For some reason, Timothy Hutton is in the movie. His involvement seemed odd to me since he has only a handful of lines in one short scene, but my husband suggested that maybe addiction is a subject he feels passionately about. That explanation makes sense to me, but you’ll have to ask him to know for sure.
Best Scene Visually:
I liked the scene near the end when Nic and his father are walking down the hallway together. I identified with Nic there. I wanted to sigh, “That’s right. Some of us are always broken, and we need all the help all the time, and we always will.” But nobody can really help you, not really. If you can’t help yourself, then everybody else should stop trying. That’s the vibe my husband was getting from the final scenes of the film, which irritated him until we got a last written warning about the tragedy of substance abuse.
Best Action Sequence:
I love the car chase, when Nic’s stepmom fruitlessly follows his car in her minivan. (“If that had been me in the minivan,” I said to my husband, “I would have caught him.”)
That’s a nice visual metaphor for the whole problem of the movie. Nic’s slipping away, and the family is chasing him, and chasing him, and chasing him…
Best Scene:
I like the entire sequence when Nic returns home sober. Chalamet’s work is really good here. We see him gradually growing depressed, and we understand why.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Timothée Chalamet:
Chalamet is brilliant in this role. I watched the movie entirely for the brilliance of his scenes. I went because he I heard he was good, and I watched perpetually longing for his next scene because he was good.
His showiest scene is probably the moment when he meets his father in a diner and leaves before eating anything. I also love his conversation in the sand with his little brother.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Steve Carell:
For me, Carell’s best moment comes when his wife questions his decision to leave home and go chasing after Nic again, and he gets incredibly emotional and loses all composure. I really like this because it’s so raw and real. We don’t often see men “ugly cry” on screen (except in comedy). Usually male weeping is either dramatically quiet or theatrically grand. He’s just broken, and there’s nothing attractive about his emotional breakdown.
Negatives:
Some of my comments may make it seem like I didn’t enjoy this movie very much, and that’s true.
“I don’t think I could watch that movie again,” my husband said as the end credits rolled.
“Honestly, I’m kind of sorry we watched it the first time,” I whispered back.
I was disappointed by the lack of insight into Nic’s addiction. We learn so much from his father’s point of view. By comparison, we get little meaty material from the son. When Nic disappears, he must go somewhere, but it’s only very late in the film when we get a true taste of this.
We need more of Nic. I enjoyed the glimpse of his journal, complete with drawings. But I feel like he’s only fully alive as a character when he’s around his father and family.
When I was eighteen, I had a similar breakdown that completely blindsided my parents who felt helpless and didn’t know what to do. My amygdala was all screwed up, too, but I didn’t take drugs to induce that state. Instead I needed drugs to treat my condition. My parents had no idea what was going on inside my mind. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me either, but I did experience it, and I wrote about it later. My experience was nothing like theirs (except that we were all terrified and felt helpless). If you would like to know what it’s like to experience a psychotic break from the inside, you can read my memoir. It’s not something everyone experiences, so those who didn’t have the experience can’t easily guess what it was like for me. That’s why I wrote about it later.
As I watched Beautiful Boy, I wanted to see more insight about Nic from Nic, not filtered through the gaze of his father. This is a very thorough and realistic treatment of what a father feels when coping with a child’s addiction. But I’ve seen far more compelling movies about being an addict. Meth is literally destroying this person’s brain. That shouldn’t be so boring, so distanced. Chalamet’s performance is marvelous, but I feel like the only real insight we get into Nic comes from the passionate, palpable agony the actor is channeling, not from any of his dialogue or actions.
Those drawings and notebook pages David finds are deeply, disturbingly compelling. Where is that Nic? I feel like we always see him only from the outside. I wish we could somehow go through the experience with him. I mean, isn’t this movie partially based on his book? If that book had drawings like the ones we see in his journal, where is that stuff? We only get it in that actual journal and in Chalamet’s voice and eyes. I demand more.
The best writing in this film is the Charles Bukowski poem Chalamet performs at the end. I’m sure Nic Sheff’s actual writing is good, too. I’d like some evidence of that in the film.
My only other complaint is that the movie feels kind of unfocused, maybe poorly structured. I also didn’t like the disorienting way it kept flashing back to random times. That was a deliberate structural choice but one that didn’t work for me.
Beautiful Boy is slow and depressing. I just realized that Felix Van Groeningen also directed The Broken Circle Breakdown, an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film a few years ago. I didn’t like that much either. Maybe I just don’t connect with the director’s work. Every time David walked into his cluttered home office, I would think, “Yes, this story feels sort of scattered.”
Of course, one brilliant aspect is that this set up really allows the performance of Timothée Chalamet to shine. He’s not only good, he’s conspicuously better than the rest of the film.
Overall:
In Beautiful Boy, Steve Carell is extremely sympathetic as a father struggling with the uncomfortable realization that he cannot save his son. Timothée Chalamet lights up the screen every time he appears and would be a deserving winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. But the movie is a true story about a young man’s struggle with crystal meth addiction. It’s a pretty grim watch.