Perceptive portrayal of addiction’s destructive ripples
MERCIFULLy, I have no direct experience of parenting a child addicted to drugs such as cocaine, heroin and crystal meth.
But I have a friend who does, and I don’t know whether to recommend this film to her in the hope that it will show her there might yet be light at the end of a desperately long, dark tunnel — or not to, because watching it will cause her unbearable pain.
Beautiful Boy is based on two memoirs, one by David Sheff (played here by Steve Carell), and another by his son, Nic (Timothee Chalamet).
It marks Belgian director Felix van Groeningen’s English- language debut and one of the producers is Brad Pitt, who has made no secret of his own past reliance on drugs. Even more significantly, the writer is Luke Davies, the Australian whose screenplay for the 2016 film Lion bagged him a deserved Oscar nomination.
Lion was an industrial- scale tearjerker, also about a much-loved child dislocated from his family — albeit in very different circumstances.
Beautiful Boy does not pack the same thunderous emotional punch, but you might still need a pack of tissues on hand, for dabbing purposes. The film yo-yos back and
forth in time, gradually building up a picture of how Nic, despite all his ostensible advantages, simply can’t keep his finger off the self- destruct button, torpedoing family life at the same time.
The rather vague implication is that his parents’ divorce, when he was still a little boy, has somehow contributed to his dependency, yet in most other ways he seems to enjoy a gilded existence.
He has looks, charm, intelligence, his family is well off, and he gets on with his stepmother ( Maura Tierney) and two much younger half-siblings. So what is it that really feeds his demons? Beautiful Boy slightly fudges the answer and perhaps we don’t even need to pose the question. Besides, his devoted but bewildered father asks quite enough questions himself, applying his forensic curiosity as an acclaimed magazine writer to his son’s illness. It was David Sheff who conducted the last-ever interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, for Playboy, and it’s Lennon’s plaintive song that gave his book, and this film, their titles.
Beautiful Boy has been criticised in some quarters for casting such a white, affluent, middle-class perspective on drug dependency. I don’t really understand why; that Nic wasn’t an obvious victim of his upbringing and environment seems to me more of a reason to tell his story.
A perhaps more valid criticism might be that van Groeningen rather sanitises the genuine horrors of addiction, but the performances are so strong (Chalamet was nominated for a Golden Globe and is in the running for a Bafta) that this doesn’t matter, either. It’s a very well-made, sad, sensitive and touching film.