Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Director: Alma Har’el
Quick Impressions:
Back when my sixteen-year-old was his four-year-old brother’s age, there were only two movie stars. I swear every movie we took him to see starred either Josh Hutcherson or Shia LaBeouf. For a while there, LaBeouf did it all. He dug holes. He surfed with penguins. He lived Rear Window. He was best friends with Bumblebee. He ruined Indiana Jones. (I, personally, disagree with that last assessment. Re-watched at home, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t that bad. The parts that are bad aren’t all LaBeouf’s, and I’m sure it wasn’t his own idea to include that bit with the monkeys. He was the co-star, not the screenwriter.)
In Honey Boy, LaBeouf is both co-star and screenwriter, and the result is a magnificent showcase for him. It simultaneously reminds us that he’s a wonderful actor and makes us more likely to forgive his troubled personal life.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about what a great year LaBeouf is having, and between Honey Boy and Peanut Butter Falcon, 2019 has been good for him, I agree. But I think people tend to go too far when talking about this rejuvenation of his career. Yes, he’s back in the public eye and doing excellent work, but LaBeouf has always been a good actor. And he’s actually been acting pretty consistently this whole time.
Even with his highly publicized issues with anger, substance abuse, mental health, and general weirdness, and his baffling decision to insult Steven Spielberg, the man who made him the lead in every movie he made for what felt like one-hundred years, LaBeouf has still been working. Yes, he’s no longer involved with the Transformers franchise or appearing in every Spielberg movie (to say the least). But I mean, he didn’t really drop off the face of the earth.
He did finally find the perfect project, though. And he did it by writing it himself. If done right, writing a memoir is extremely cathartic and personally rewarding. I’ve written one myself (actually, two), and I would recommend the process to anyone struggling with unresolved trauma. Writing honestly about sensitive subjects (admitting mistakes, reliving difficult episodes, dredging up feelings you’ve deliberately been burying) is not easy. Projects like this are sometimes dismissed as self-indulgent, but if you are doing it correctly, the process is difficult and painful. For me, the hardest part about writing a memoir about journeying to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (i.e. suffering through prolonged psychotic breaks until eventually somebody understood what was going on) came at the very end of the process when I went back and changed the pseudonym I’d been using to my own name. And nobody even knows my name! LaBeouf is being brutally honest here, and everybody knows his name. It cannot be easy to expose your inner demons and childhood abuse to everyone in the entire world.
Not only is LaBeouf revealing the abuse he suffered as a child, but he is himself portraying his own abuser in the film. And he’s playing him sympathetically…because the man who abused him is his own father…and he loves him.
Do I mean that LaBeouf loves his abusive father, or that his abusive father loves him? Yes.
My favorite line in this film is a complaint by Otis, the fictional version of Shia himself, during in-patient therapy. “The only thing my father ever gave me that was worth anything was pain, and you’re trying to take it away from me.” That’s the heart of the movie.
It’s a moving film, one that persuasively suggests that we should all consider accepting Shia LaBeouf as he is because he’s decided to accept himself. An Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor does not feel out of reach. I don’t know if he will get it, but he would deserve it. In fact, child actor Noah Jupe deserves it, too.
The Good:
Noah Jupe is like the Shia LaBeouf of 2019. He’s everywhere. (Well, I guess Shia LaBeouf is the Shia LaBeouf of 2019, but what I mean is, Jupe is a rising young star who is beginning to feel omnipresent.) Besides being the (fairly memorable) son in last year’s A Quiet Place, he is also Petey in Ford v Ferrari (and someone could not unreasonably argue that he gives the breakout performance of that film). LaBeouf himself was a very talented young actor, so playing him at twelve is not easy. Jupe’s scenes are all so emotional. His character has to endure verbal and physical abuse from a man being played by the person who was the actual recipient of the abuse. That adds an extra layer of complication to all of Jupe’s scenes. Not just any young actor would be up to a challenge like this, and without a strong performance from Jupe, the movie would fall apart. For Honey Boy to work, we have to believe in the authenticity of those scenes with young Otis and his father, and Jupe makes it feel raw and real.
But LaBeouf himself is the most amazing thing about the movie. Just before we watched Honey Boy, my husband was talking about a conversation we heard the other day when we watched Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson interview each other as part of the Variety Actors on Actors series. (You can watch it on YouTube.) At one point, Evans discussed playing a villain in a stage play. He emphasized that the character does not see himself as a villain, so he must sympathize with the character and internalize his world view in order to play him correctly. This line of thinking was revelatory for my husband. And after watching Honey Boy, we talked a long time about what it must have meant to Shia LaBeouf to play his own father. He does not sugar coat any of the abuse. The father yells, belittles his son, makes fun of the size of his penis, swears at him, throws lit cigarettes at him, embarrasses him, hits him, gives him cigarettes, violently threatens his friend, leaves him alone for hours at a time, and, of course, gets his only paychecks from him. He does a lot of classically abusive stuff. It’s not really ambiguous. It is clearly inappropriate parenting. The man can’t seem to control his temper. But his son (who was that little boy we see being abused) plays his father sympathetically, even tenderly. The boy he abused is the one not only playing him, but also writing all of his lines, yet we come to see this father as a pitiable figure, a broken man, who himself has a traumatic past and spends most of his life in agony. And he genuinely loves his son. (And in fairness, he doesn’t do everything wrong. He’s right not to let his child work unreasonable hours. He is sometimes correct about his wife’s poor parenting. And, though how he handles the issue is unconscionable, the problem he has with his son having a Big Brother is not hard to understand. His resentment seems forgivable, though the way he expresses it is not.) To LaBeouf’s credit as a writer, actor (and son), we see this father and all his flaws, yet we do not hate him, and we believe he loves his child.
The rest of the cast is good, too. The perpetually traumatized Lucas Hedges shows up as the twenty-something Otis, so we see who is writing the story and why. Laura San Giacomo plays one of his doctors. I was so surprised to see her in a movie. I personally think first of her roles in Pretty Woman and Just Shoot Me. I don’t watch the shows she’s on now, so I haven’t seen her at all for three hundred years. I gasped in surprise when she first showed up. Byron Bowers plays another patient and gets all of the funniest lines. His character is the highlight of the frame story.
But honestly, what makes the movie work are the brutal, moving scenes between Jupe and LaBeouf.
Best Scene:
Both my husband and I were impressed by Otis’s phone call with his mother, the way he relays dialogue from one parent to the other, as if he’s emotionally checked out of this tense moment by turning it into just another acting job. Jupe is amazing here. (I would be happy if he got a Best Supporting Actor nomination, but that seems impossible.) (And for the record, I think Otis’s mother’s behavior here makes her seem like not such a great parent, either.)
Best Scene Visually:
The scene Otis performs in his show (or maybe it’s his movie of the week, the part with all the food) is pretty captivating. I like the use of something as silly and superficial as one of those Disney kids’ shows LaBeouf was on to reveal something deep and meaningful about Otis’s interior state.
Best Action Sequence:
The barbecue with the Big Brother is certainly tense.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Shia LaBeouf:
I hope LaBeouf gets an Oscar nomination for his work here. When the father goes to his support group and opens up about his own abuse, you do feel for the character. Especially humanizing and endearing is his comment about being in so much emotional pain, yet unable to drink or take drugs for relief because he needs to take care of his son.
The Negatives:
I’ve loved Lucas Hedges in so many movies, but I’m not sure he really belongs in this one. Despite how often he’s played tormented young men, he just seems miscast here to me. Part of the problem is that he looks absolutely nothing like Shia LaBeouf. That wouldn’t be an issue except that Noah Jupe does resemble the young Shia LaBeouf a great deal. (In superficial ways, admittedly. I’m not claiming they’re twins. But the dark, soulful eyes, the wild, curly hair. Hedges just has the wrong look entirely.) Another problem is that his scenes are the least captivating because of the material he’s given. The frame is only necessary to give us the idea that this is autobiographical and LaBeouf is playing his own father. If we didn’t see an adult version of the Jupe character writing the movie in rehab, we might not understand. Possibly, too, I’m just getting tired of seeing Hedges play the same types of characters in the same way all the time. Initially, I thought him more talented than his peer Timothée Chalamet, but Chalamet has strategically appeared in such a variety of roles in so many different kinds of movies. Hedges has a lot of talent, but I worry that typecasting is starting to be a problem for him. His performances are all starting to feel the same. Also, though he’s doing good work, he’s simply overshadowed by Jupe and LaBeouf (who besides being excellent individually have the advantage of performing most of their scenes together). I would have cast someone else in this role. I realize that LaBeouf can’t play himself if he’s playing his father, but there must be a better fit than Hedges. He just feels like the weak link, which is frustrating because he’s extremely talented. The scenes with Jupe and LaBeouf feel real. Hedges feels less real.
(My husband points out that in some scenes Hedges sounds like LaBeouf. Yes. And I know LaBeouf had that terrible haircut for a while. The thing is, Hedges seems like an actor playing LaBeouf in a movie, but somehow, the scenes with Jupe feel real, raw, authentic, possibly because Shia himself is actually there as Jupe’s scene partner.)
I also found the movie kind of short and anticlimactic. But now, possibly that’s because this past week I watched both Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Irishman. I guess I’ve grown accustomed to excessively long films. But I really did not expect this one to end so soon. The story did not feel over to me (but maybe that’s because LaBeouf is still alive and continuing his journey of self discovery and personal growth).
The scenes with FKA Twigs as the girl across the street also made me increasingly uncomfortable and apprehensive. I guess that’s not a bad thing, but it was hard to watch. I was worried, and for me, there’s too much of a hint of ambiguity in how the relationship plays out. (Maybe the point is that after all that abusive behavior, kind behavior looks strange. But I was worried about that child.)
This is the kind of movie that makes you continuously examine your potential failings as a parent as you watch. I guess the good news is, if you screw up as horribly as this guy, maybe your children will at least still know you loved them.
Overall:
If you are a fan of Shia LaBeouf, show him you care by watching this film. He wants to share something important about himself with you. Even if you’re not a particular fan, you might want to give Honey Boy a look. It contains excellent performances by LaBeouf and Jupe, and you might find it genuinely moving. Everybody loves catharsis, after all.