Magnificent and confounding in equal measure, “Beau is Afraid,” a new, three-hour epic from “Midsommar” director Ari Aster and now playing in theatres, is a nightmarish trek through a mishmash of mommy issues, anxiety and tragedy. Imagine a paranoid “Lord of the Rings” style quest reimagined by Luis Buñuel with a darkly comedic “After Hours” vibe and a hint of Thomas “You Can’t Go Home Again” Wolfe and you’ll be on the road to understanding Beau’s surreal journey.
Joaquin Phoenix plays the title character, a neurotic, over-medicated man whose father died at the moment of his son’s conception. The loss forever colored his life, leaving him lost in a sea of paranoia and uncertainty. “I am so sorry for what your daddy passed down to you,” says his overbearing mother Mona (Patti LaPone).
Beau’s already chaotic life is forever changed by a missed plane, a new prescription and a home invasion. Set off on an odyssey to return home for his mother’s funeral, circumstance continually keep him off track. First, he finds himself the reluctant patient of affable suburban caregivers Roger and Grace (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), their troubled daughter (Kylie Rogers) and a war vet with PTSD.
Then, a narrow escape finds him in the embrace of a travelling experimental theater troupe whose storytelling transports him into an animated folk tale of searching, struggle and solace.
Finally, bloodied and bruised, he arrives home to confront his past, face his fears and come to grips with the trauma that hangs over his life like a shroud.
“Beau is Afraid” is a complicated movie, laden with allegory and symbolism, that confronts the aftereffects of loss and grief. It’s familiar terrain for Aster, whose previous films, “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” were also studies in intergenerational trauma.
But the new movie is anything but familiar.
It is a psychological dramedy that dives deep into how Beau’s trauma has molded every aspect of his life and lead to a breakdown, one we witness from his point-of-view, in real time. It’s a harrowing trip as Beau slowly loses his grip on reality, and his paranoia shapes the movie’s narrative.
Aster is uncompromising in his portrayal of Beau’s state of mind. His previous movies were more visually shocking, featuring images more aligned to traditional horror. “Beau is Afraid” has less overt horror. It’s more concerned with the psychological, the confusion, fear and anxiety that drives Beau. To convey this, Phoenix, in an internal performance, plays the character as a shell. The movie revolves around him and his state of mind, but he is a reactive character, one who responds to, rather than instigates, the action. It’s interesting, deeply felt work but the closed down, Chauncey Gardiner nature of the character makes him difficult to embrace.
Given the unsettled nature of the real world, audiences may understand, relate or sympathize with Beau’s all-encompassing fear, but the absurdism woven into Phoenix’s childlike performance, particularly in the film’s second half, wears thin.
“Beau is Afraid” is the weirdest film on Aster’s already proudly weird IMDB page. It may be the definition of a film that is not for everyone, but it cannot be faulted for its uncompromising vision. As a search for meaning in life, for closure from trauma, for freedom from fear, from relief from distended testicles (Yup! You read that right), it was never going to be a feel-good flick. So, instead, it swings for the fences, burrowing in on its grandiose emotional ideas even if it often feels like a three-hour panic attack.
Unpredictable, unexpected and ultimately, unexplainable, it’s challenging cinema that connects on a subconscious level.
In “C’mon C’mon,” a new black-and-white drama now playing in theatres, radio journalist Johnny, played by Joaquin Phoenix, says he likes to record sound because “it makes the mundane immortal.” Writer/director Mike Mills attempts to create that same kind of magic in his straightforward, unassuming film.
The soft-spoken radio presenter is travelling around the United States, interviewing children about their lives, experiences and the future, when he offers to look at after his nine-year-old nephew Jesse (Woody Norman). Jesse’s mom Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) will be out of town for a week, helping her ex-husband (Scoot McNairy) get settled in a mental health facility. When she is delayed on her return, Johnny takes the youngster on work trips to New York and New Orleans. While Johnny becomes a father figure to Jesse, his relationship with Viv deepens as the long distance, shared experience of looking after the boy brings them closer.
“C’mon C’mon” is a quiet movie that speaks volumes. It asks simple questions, like “Are you happy?” and tries, often in a roundabout way, to answer them. Jesse and Johnny’s conversations, which make up the vast bulk of the movie, are simultaneously insightful, frustrating and vulnerable. Just like real life.
As Jesse, Norman is a child wise beyond his years. He’s a fan of conspiracy theories, asks pointed questions to adults, has a vivid imagination but no friends. What he shares with his uncle is an emotional directness, even if he doesn’t completely grasp what he’s feeling and why.
Oscar winner Phoenix approaches Johnny with warmth and keeps the theatrics to a minimum. They complement one another, feeling out their relationship as they go, learning from one another. It’s lovely in its ordinariness, made all the more special by the naturalistic performances.
I don’t know if “C’mon C’mon” will become immortal, it’s a little too freeform for that, but the simple human truths it essays already are.
We will never know what Cesar Romero, the first actor to wear the Joker’s scary clown make up, would think about his old alter ego as interpreted by Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker,” but one thing is for sure, he wouldn’t recognize the nihilistic new take on the character.
Set in a rat-infested Gotham City, the story sees Arthur Fleck, an unstable man doing the best he can with state sponsored therapy and medication. By day he performs as a clown, dancing at children’s hospitals or holding “Going Out of Business” signs on Gotham’s mean streets. At night, when not day dreaming of becoming a stand-up comic, he’s tending to his infirm mother (Frances Conroy). Late at night they cozy up and watch their favorite TV show, a talk show hosted by Merv-Griffin-wannabe Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Sometimes Arthur even daydreams that Murray is a warm and loving father figure.
In the real-world things have a grimmer shade. Arthur is constantly harassed by co-workers and, worse, abused by complete strangers. On the day he is fired from his job he fights back, shooting and killing three businessmen who tried to beat him on his subway ride home. When news of the Clown Killer circulates, he becomes the anonymous figurehead of a populist resistance movement. Protestors riot in the streets, wearing clown masks and with signs emblazoned with slogans like We Are All Clowns and Down with Money.
Not that Arthur notices. “I’m not political,” he says. With no job, and, after his therapy program is cancelled, no medication, his extreme behavior escalates. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” he says. “Nothing can hurt me anymore.”
Although ripe with elements from older movies like “Death Wish,” the God’s lonely man favorites “Mean Streets” and Taxi Driver” and echoes from real-life forgotten names like Bernard Goetz, “Joker” is no period piece. It’s as timely as the yesterday’s headlines. A study of everything from alienation and disappointment to the failure of social safety nets and access to weapons, it’s a character study not just of the Joker but of a troubled time. “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society who abandoned him?” Joker asks. “You get what you deserve.”
This isn’t a superhero film, there are links and connections to the Batman and Joker stories that came before but this is a horror movie, a look into what happens when the chaos in Arthur’s head becomes manifest. “For my whole life I didn’t know if I existed,” he says, “but now I know I do and people are noticing.” He’s the result of a broken system that turns their back on the mentally ill and underprivileged.
Phoenix, who dropped fifty-two pounds to play the role, displays not just a wasted body, but also spirit in a haunting performance that reinvents the character for a new generation. His take on Arthur finds its roots in marginalized people. “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loaner with a society who abandoned him?” he asks. “You get what you deserve.” It is a harrowing performance, not always easy to watch, that almost generates sympathy for a broken man who becomes an agent of chaos and one of the DC canon’s greatest villains.
“Joker” drags in its middle section, unpleasantly luxuriating in Arthur’s grim collapse into anarchy, but is held afloat by Phoenix. It may not be a deep or realistic study of mental illness but it showcases Arthur’s weariness at being treated as the cigarette butt under society’s heel.
The message of finding control through vigilante violence is a disturbing one, but IRL it’s one that plays out on the news with disturbing frequency. “Is it just me or is it getting crazier out there?” Arthur asks.
Based on a historical novel by Canadian-born author Patrick deWitt “The Sisters Brothers” is a buddy Western that, for better and for worse, doesn’t rely on the clichés associated with buddy flicks or Westerns.
Set in 1851 Oregon, “The Sisters Brothers” tells parallel stories. First we meet the brothers, Eli (Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix). The pair are bounty hunters and all-round thugs for hire, currently working for a mysterious Oregon City mob boss known only as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer in a wordless cameo). “You do realize our father was stark raving mad and his foul blood runs in us,” Charlie says to his big bro. “Its why were good at what we do.” Violent and ruthless, wherever they go a heap of sorrow is left behind.
Their latest job is to meet detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is to hand off Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist-turned-gold-prospector who has developed a formula to make searching for gold a scientific rather than physical procedure. It’s a chemical mixture that, when poured in the river, lights up the gold. All you have to do is reach in and pick it up
It’s a get rich quick scheme and the Commodore desperately wants to get his hands on it. Warm’s ultimate goal is much more pure. He has visions of using the gold money to create a new society in Texas that favours nonviolence, education and true democracy. Morris the hunter becomes the hunted when Warm appeals to his better nature. Moved by warm’s plea—“The Sisters will cut off my fingers, burn my feet,” he says—Morris becomes a business partner. The big question? What will happen if and when the Sister Brothers catch up with them?
The four leads play tough guys and cowboys who spend as much time discussing their feelings as they do firing their guns. The brothers have daddy issues—he was a violent alcoholic—while Morris hated his father for any number of sins, both personal and professional.
The brothers bicker constantly. Eli, a great lummox who, at first glance seems ill suited for the job at hand and yet never hesitates to shoot an adversary in the head, is sensitive and wants to settle down. Charlie, on the other hand, is a wild card, with a hair trigger and a more limited idea as to what the future may or may not bring.
The conversations range from heartfelt to funny and are the engine that propels the action. There are shoot-outs and horses and all the other tropes of the genre but this story is actually about the guys, not their actions. A John Wayne oater this ain’t. Instead it is a movie that explores the masculine bond that lies at the heart of so may westerns but is never fully explored.
“The Sisters Brothers” is a story about family, purpose and male bonding made human by a sensitive performance from Reilly (who also produced) and his chemistry with Phoenix. It’s a buddy flick and a Western but it’s also more than the sum of its parts.
“Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot” isn’t as much about the story of John Callahan, the Portland based quadriplegic who became a famous, if controversial cartoonist after a car accident, as it is about his personal journey.
The film starts at the end, beginning after the accident and backing up into Callahan’s story of misfortune, self-discovery, and redemption. Our first glimpse of Joaquin Phoenix as the cartoonist comes at a settled place in his life. From there director Gus Van Sant moves along the timeline of Callahan’s life. We see him on the bender that resulted in the car accident that left him in a wheelchair, his treatment,
Alcoholic’s Anonymous meetings presided over by sponsor Donnie (Jonah Hill) and at home with his helper (Tony Greenhand).
It’s fragmented approach that focuses on the themes in Callahan’s life rather than the events. His journey is a metaphysical one, from unhappy, aimless slacker to someone who embraces community. Van Sant and Phoenix explore the artist’s psyche, detailing how being put up for adoption at birth fuelled his alcoholism and unresolved feelings of abandonment. Phoenix, limited in his movement for much of the film, hands in a rich performance, both volatile and vulnerable.
He’s aided by a talented supporting cast lead by Hill. He’s tough love personified, a tell-it-like it is A.A. sponsor who calls his charges Piglets. The meetings at his home are a whose who of interesting casting from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon as a Valium addict with a propensity of getting naked in public, Udo Kier and musician Beth Ditto’s unrestrained presence steals every scene she is in. Jack Black, in a small but pivotal role, gets to showcase both his gonzo and sensitive sides.
John Callahan is best known for his macabre drawings but the film of his life ois anything but. “Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot” is a breezy, life affirming look at a man whose misfortune was his salvation.
“You Were Never Really Here” is about a man with a special set of skills who rescues young women and yet it couldn’t be any more different from “Taken” and other recent guardian angel action movies.
Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe, a bulky, bearded veteran who lives with his mother. When he isn’t rescuing young girls from human traffickers he’s doing household chores, helping his mom clean the silver wear or, when memories of his violent past overtake him, trying to kill himself.
Driven by vengeance and haunted by memories of childhood abuse he metes out punishment to human traffickers, violently beating them with fists and hammers. “Can you be brutal?” asks a client. “I can,” he replies calmly.
When a job retrieving Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the eleven-year-old daughter of a high-ranking New York politician (Alex Manette), from a pedophile ring goes sideways, Joe is forced to delve deeper than ever before.
There is violence in “You Were Never Really Here” but don’t expect a Liam Neeson style action flick. First of all Joe’s special set of skills mainly include surveillance and ball peen hammer assault. Secondly Joe doesn’t have any catchphrases. He’s a secretive man of action, plagued by PTSD and driven by a sense of righteous justice. Think Travis Bickle, not former Green Beret and CIA operative Bryan Mills.
Phoenix delivers a deceptively simple performance. A man of few words Joe expresses himself in other ways and Phoneix finds way to do much while doing very little. The pain in his eyes, amplified by random flashbacks to his troubled youth, reveals both his personal torture and why he works exclusively with mistreated children. More importantly are the traces of humanity that slip through Joe’s blank façade. The way he dotes on his mother or holds a dying man’s hand, singing along with a syrupy pop song, as life slips away. In another scene he instructs his pre-teen rescue to close her eyes, trying to protect what little innocence she has left, before he bludgeons one of her captors to death. It’s in these moments that Joe becomes a fully rounded character and not simply a killing machine.
Scottish director Lynne Ramsay never gives away the game, doling out the details only as necessary. The flashbacks are jagged, poking into the story like a shard of glass slashing through silk. Those elements, bolstered by an anxiety inducing score—loud, abrasive yet beautiful—from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, combine to present an intriguing, elliptical portrait of a tortured soul.
Steve Martin, who studied philosophy at California State University once joked, “If you’re studying Geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but Philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.”
Such is the case with Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) the eponymous “Irrational Man” of Woody Allen’s fiftieth movie. A university professor about to start a new job at a new university, he’s brilliant but has fallen into the kind of existential funk that can only come from a lifetime spent studying philosophy. He’s the kind of guy who uses “As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out…” as a conversation starter and drinks single malt scotch from a flask in public.
He’s lost his zest for life, but not his appeal to women. Within days of the beginning of the semester he’s sleeping with the age appropriate but married Rita (Parker Posey) and is fighting off the advances of a student, Jill (Emma Stone). “He’s a sufferer,” she says with stars in her eyes, “and very conservative in a liberal sort of way.”
When he and Jill overhear a conversation regarding a crooked judge, suddenly his life has meaning. He decides to “make the world a better place” by getting rid of the judge. Planning the perfect murder, a crime he feels will benefit humanity, brings zest back into his life and puts a spring in his step.
From here “Irrational Man” becomes part character study and part romance and while it’s not exactly a whodunnit—more of a whydunnit—there is a procedural element to the last quarter of the film.
Subject wise Allen is in his element here, giving a raft of characters a chance to talk philosophy and the meaning of life but while the story should have forward momentum the farce ever escalates. Instead Allen relies too heavily on narration slowing down the action to a crawl.
Despite appealing performances from all, the story feels like a talky celebration of Abe’s dysfunction—the poor tortured genius—than a true study of a person pushed to extremes in search of happiness. Allen makes a movie a year, and while he often hits pay dirt there are years when it feels like he should have taken some time off, maybe vacationed in the South of France and recharged. This is one of those years.
Early on in “Irrational Man” Abe says, “Much of philosophy is verbal masturbation.” I said the same thing about the movie as the closing credits rolled.
The term “inherent vice” can be found on property insurance policies eliminating coverage for loss “caused by a quality in property that causes it to damage or destroy itself.” In other words, if the chocolate you’re shipping melts, you’re out of luck.
The new film from director Paul Thomas Anderson not only borrows the term as a title, but also the spirit. A complex stoner detective story, the movie’s characters are a doomed lot, debasing themselves with their own behavior. The result is a story of damaged personalities that requires a roadmap to navigate.
Joaquin Phoenix, is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a shaggy haired hippie detective in 1970 Los Angeles. Perpetually stoned he sees the world through a fog, and writes things like, “Paranoia Alert!” and “Not hallucinating” in his red detective’s notebook. When his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston) asks him to investigate a plot to have her wealthy, married lover committed to a mental health facility, Doc is sucked into a complicated web of deceit involving a neurotic LA cop named Bigfoot (josh Brolin), a snitch (Owen Wilson), a drug crazed dentist (Martin Short), a drug syndicated called the Golden Fang and a man with a swastika tattooed on his face (Keith Jardine).
“Inherent Vice” plays like a brainier Cheech and Chong movie. The rambling story, that makes the work of Alaskan Native storytelling seem linear, sometimes gets lost in a cloud of pot smoke, and is occasionally almost incomprehensible, but never less than compelling. The actors, doing very high-level work, cut through the confusing murk of the plot, putting a human face on the twists and turns of the tale.
It’s been suggested that the mutton-chopped Phoenix based his performance on Leslie Nielsen’s work with the Zucker Brothers. That means playing it straight, or as straight as a stoner can be played. His hard-boiled lingo and natural PI ability are not played for laughs, but every now and again a measure of slapstick works its way into the performance; an unexpected yelp or an eager lunge at a table full of white powder. It’s an audacious performance that rides the line between serious and ridiculous without ever swaying too far one way or the other.
Your appreciation of Phoenix’s work, or at least the essence of the work, will relate directly to your enjoyment of “Inherent Vice.” The wonky tone, spread throughout the movie’s 148 minute running time, feels like an extended joke the audience isn’t always in on. When it works, it hums along, like a strange but enjoyable dream. When it doesn’t, it’s nightmarishly incoherent.
