ABOUT A BEAUTIFUL BOY
The actor whose name is on everyone’s lips enlivens a sometimes dreary look at addiction, writes
Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen first came to international attention when his 2013 film The Broken
Circle Breakdown — a raw, bluegrass-infused tale of the ups and downs of a relationship — earned him a best foreign language Oscar nomination.
For his first Englishlanguage feature, Van Groeningen has chosen to adapt the fatherand-son addiction memoirs of David and Nic Sheff — one written by a writer struggling to understand how his beautiful, privileged son became a meth addict, and the other giving the son’s version.
Van Groeningen and writer Luke Davies attempt, with varying levels of success, to craft a story that combines elements of both books but mostly examines the story of Nic (Timothée Chalamet) from the perspective of his increasingly alienated and perplexed father (Steve Carell).
What perhaps marks this film out from a long list of films about addiction is its downbeat, lack-of-glamour-or-excess approach to its material and a determination on the part of its director to take the audience on the often banal and soul-sucking, repetitively disappointing journey that many addicts and their loved ones are all too familiar with.
We begin in the office of a San Francisco doctor (Timothy Hutton), where David is trying to find out exactly what happens to his son’s brain when he’s doing drugs. From there the narrative moves backwards and forwards in time to David’s memories of his son — both good and bad — as he struggles to understand, and alienates both his current wife (Maura Tierney) and his ex, Nic’s mother (Amy Ryan).
Occasionally the story shifts perspective to Nic as we watch him struggling to stay clean at college or alone on the streets, high on meth or at home breaking into his father’s house with a girlfriend to steal things to sell for more drugs. The film never really manages to answer David’s questions because, as his son tells him, he doesn’t know what it is about the drug that got him so hooked, other than he just liked how it made him feel. The point is not to unravel a mystery but rather to convey the difficulties, disappointments and uncertainty that addicts and their parents experience on a journey that is often unsuccessful in achieving a happy outcome.
This very heavy and potentially dreary material is held together by the performances of its two leads. Carell long ago earned himself the acting chops to prove that he’s more than just a comic actor and here his particular brand of put-uponfrom-all-sides-by-the-unfairness-of-theworld exasperation is well suited to the journey of David, who even tries some meth at one point — with predictable if not addictive results.
However, there are times when the film drags and seems to have nowhere to go except to another sad meeting between father and son or David getting mad at himself for not being able to do anything, and that’s the fault of the decision to hang the story mainly on the perspective of the father at the expense of the experiences of the son.
That decision’s shortfalls are made glaringly apparent because at 22 years old and with one Oscar nomination already under his belt, Chalamet delivers another of the performances of understated emotional depth and clarity that are quickly earning him a deserved reputation as the millennial method master.
If it weren’t for his remarkable acting, you have to feel that the film would fail far more often than it does and end up being a boring, middle-class Bohemian white privilege yawn.
But Chalamet’s subtle shifts — during a challenging journey that requires a lot from someone so young — keep you watching. Tierney and Ryan also offer fine performances but they are unfortunately somewhat sidelined in the focus on the father-son relationship.
As a film about addiction, Beautiful Boy certainly offers a different and necessary look at the banalities and repetitive loops of addiction. But it is not without its flaws, and these begin to show towards the end of its just-over-two-hour running time.
However, although it may be the wrong reason to see the movie, Chalamet’s performance towers over the film and that’s not necessarily a bad thing because who doesn’t want to be able say they were there when a star was about to shoot off into the stratosphere?