Ari Aster is cashing in some sort of blank check for his latest film, which is a three hour art film about a deeply anxious man trying to visit his mother. It feels very much like Aster is trying to do his own take on the Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry school of existential dread comedy, complete with constantly shifting frames of reality, a deeply damaged male protagonist, and painstakingly composed Surrealist frames that are packed with visual information. Aster is not Kaufman, and unable to access the deeper wells of humanity and insight that make films like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" so poignant. However, he is a lot funnier and nuttier.
Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in a miserable apartment in an anarchic, crime-ridden city, where every day is a battle against chaos and depravity. He wants to go visit his wealthy mother Mona (Patti Lupone), but catastrophe after catastrophe prevents this. We're clearly not meant to be taking any of this literally, but rather as an allegorical representation of how reality looks to Beau. It's a dreadful existence, where monsters and maniacs lurk around every corner wearing human faces. Every interaction with another person is rife with misunderstandings and terrible consequences. Everyone seems to hate him or is hostile to him for no reason, and Beau's soft-spoken, mumbled attempts to explain himself just make things worse.
I don't think that "Beau is Afraid" accomplishes everything that it sets out to do, and is way too indulgent for its own good. However, I respect and admire its seemingly boundless ambition. There's a long digression in the second act for a fantasy sequence, where Beau imagines himself living out another life in a stylized, animated landscape. There are a couple of wild action sequences, the first involving Beau getting chased out of his apartment while stark naked, the second involving a kill-happy combat veteran named Jeeves (Denis Menochet) keen on annihilating him. The ending involves a show trial sequence, which Beau attends in a rowboat. A lot of the twists and turns of the plot feel inane or arbitrary, but the talent involved is top notch, and deeply committed to the absurdity the whole way through.
I'll watch Joaquin Phoenix in just about anything, but I adore him as Beau, this hapless, terrified soul who is constantly fleeing from one bad situation to the next. He's constantly injured, always in some state of dishevelment, and perpetually uncomfortable. Up against a world where everyone is yelling at him, disappointed with him, or sees him as a target to be obliterated, Beau is a deer forever in the headlights, too paralyzed with terror to do more than react instinctively in most situations. He's incredibly sympathetic, because everything is against him, but at the same time there are a few little moments that suggest that we're not getting the whole truth from Beau's deeply subjective point of view. There's an interpretation of "Beau is Afraid" that suggests that Beau is actually a malevolent, terrible human being who is seeing events in the most favorable light to himself, where he's the victim of everyone he's actually wronged. Surrealist films are neat like that. Watching Beau's total inability to deal with any situation is often also very, very funny.
The filmmaking is endlessly impressive, of course. Ari Aster's oppressive visuals can turn ordinary places into horror hellscapes, and that's certainly true here. However, the point of "Beau" is not only to frighten and disturb, but to explore many different corners of Beau's psyche, including flashbacks to a more idyllic boyhood with a younger, nicer version of his mother (Zoe Lister-Jones), and encounters with other strange people, including a seemingly kind couple played by Amy Smart and Nathan Lane. Thus, the action moves from darkened forests to suburban homes to fantastical worlds - all lovingly designed and realized with great attention to detail. The sound design is especially impactful, using layers of different sounds, some muffled and almost inaudible, to affect the mood and atmosphere.
I don't think I would have enjoyed "Beau is Afraid" so much when I was younger, and I hadn't encountered this kind of film before. I would have been more inclined to take Beau's terror at face value, and miss the way the jump scares frequently doubled as punchlines, and how Beau is clearly a very, very unreliable narrator. I wouldn't have been inclined to simply enjoy the weirdness for its own sake, even if I can't shake the feeling that I've seen so much of it before. (Is that a "Lisztomania" reference in the final act?!) There is no reason for "Beau is Afraid" to exist, with so much nudity, with so much insanity, and did I mention it's three hours long? But it does, and I'm glad it does.
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