NOT A DAMP EYE IN THE HOUSE
Confusing chronology and cutaways make it hard to invest in Beautiful Boy
Many North American moviegoers were introduced to Belgian writer-director Felix Van Groeningen through his 2012 musical-romance The Broken Circle Breakdown, a melancholy love story told out of order, like a diary whose pages had been scattered on the wind. Emotionally rich and moody, it was almost guaranteed to make you cry. Compare that to Beautiful Boy, which would seem to have similar lacrymal aspirations. After all, it tells the story of a father and his drug-addicted son, played by empathy-incarnate Steve Carell and rising-star Timothée Chalamet, whose features are so luminous you can imagine Michelangelo turning him away as a potential model. “Too perfect,” the Renaissance artist would have huffed. “No one will believe it.” And yet, when the film had its world première at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, the audience response was muted. I didn’t check every patron, but I’d be willing to bet there wasn’t a damp eye in the house. What went wrong ? The screenplay was adapted by Van Groeningen and Luke Davies (Lion) from a pair of memoirs: Tweak, by Nic Sheff, who in the movie is played by Chalamet; and Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, by David Sheff (Carell). Those sources might explain why the women in the story are so underplayed, even when embodied by the excellent Amy Ryan (as Nic’s mom and David’s ex-wife) and Maura Tierney (new wife, stepmom). For a while I wasn’t even sure what David’s relationships were to these women, so caught up is he in trying to save his son. That selfless and ultimately futile quest is what gives Beautiful
Boy its narrative momentum and its pathos. We’ve long been told that addicts are ultimately responsible for saving themselves, but who could watch a loved one self-destruct without wanting to wade in and help? This is especially so when it’s your child; as a parent, you’ve been responsible for all their mishaps since birth. Carell certainly goes the distance; in one almost-funny scene, he decides to score some meth and try it himself, apparently to little effect. And it’s true that trying to help someone with a substance addiction can feel like an addiction in itself: repetition without end; highs of sobriety followed inevitably by relapse — which, confusingly, can be defined as a part of recovery. But for all the emotional heft in the performances — and Beautiful Boy will certainly speak to those who share its central issue — the film’s own sentiments seem oddly flattened by the end of two hours. Part of this is due to its fractured timeline; what worked so well in Broken Circle leaves us lost in a chronology that is confusingly circular to begin with.
Beautiful Boy had its world première at the Toronto International Film Festival, coincidentally alongside Ben Is Back, which stars Lucas Hedges and Julia Roberts in another tale of addicted child and distraught parent. And while it may seem cruel to rate one sad story over another, that’s part of the critic’s job. Ben Is Back opens Dec. 14, and if you only see one childaddict story this season, well ...