Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023)

[DarkImbecile]

Are you Erick Weber's alt account?

Big fan of his criticism. No critic has the guts to call out the industry. We need more freethinkers like him and Chris Gore in the film criticism world.

No idea who Weber is, but if you want to continue to post here, do more than just regurgitate and repost his material, thanks

[Mr Sausage]

What baffles me about his post (aside from the schoolmarm priggishness of his tone—“stepped out of line”? Really?) is that long movies have never been so popular. Of the top ten highest grossing films of 2022, half are over 140 minutes, and two of them are three hours, including the #1 at a full 192 minutes. Just this year we’ve had a big 3-hour hit in John Wick 4.

If Aster’s film underperforms, it won’t be due to length, it’ll be because it’s not horror.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I haven’t liked anything Ari Aster made, but to say he’s “out of line” for his runtime is absurd. The guy produced two hits and clearly was given freedom to make whatever he wanted, and still trimmed it down from its initial four-hour runtime. To quantify someone’s creation in terms of what your metrics for success are is to deny yourself the experience to find pleasure or enjoyment in risks, challenges, and even failures. What’s the point of even enjoying movies when that’s how you approach it?

Had to look up the two critics you were referring too as I never heard of them. “Freethinkers” famously make content for YouTube, right? Go read a book, take a walk, and maybe rethink your relationship with art.

[Mr Sausage]

I’ll be skipping Erick Weber. Anyone who mistakes a shopworn truism like ‘less is more’ for real criticism isn’t worth listening to.

[yoloswegmaster]

I'm more confused as to why anyone would create an account dedicated to Erick Weber of all people. Can't wait for the Ruimy/Wells stan accounts to start popping up.

Bonus: Here's some hilarious post-screening commentary from someone who sounds a lot like Weber.

[EWMMTFAN]

I haven’t liked anything Ari Aster made, but to say he’s “out of line” for his runtime is absurd. The guy produced two hits and clearly was given freedom to make whatever he wanted, and still trimmed it down from its initial four-hour runtime. To quantify someone’s creation in terms of what your metrics for success are is to deny yourself the experience to find pleasure or enjoyment in risks, challenges, and even failures. What’s the point of even enjoying movies when that’s how you approach it?

You can have lengthy movies be legitimate pieces that flow smoothly. Some of my favorite movies have been three hours long. The important distinction is that self indulgence becomes the main downfall of creativity, when you think you will have the best art through without self-control. We're seeing too many bloated movies in the theatrical marketplace that should be at least minimum 90 minute programmers. What it sounds like from initial response is Ari Aster has no self imposing over his work, even while trimming the original fat length of 4 hrs. Somebody has to step in the editing booth and tell Aster, okay, this scene was unnecessary, let's edited this out of the picture. Directors need to free their egos by listening to more figure heads that understand the viewing audience paying to see your movie.

[therewillbeblus]

Every reaction I’ve read to this film - including negative impressions - seem to “get” that this is free-flowing by design to serve the tone and themes of Aster’s vision. So it’s going off the rails because that reflexively mirrors the character’s existential crisis, losing hold on reality, etc. It’s so weird to rigidly make assumptions without seeing a piece of art to the point where it births some kind of warped sense of an “objective truth,” but it’s even more absurd when those assumptions don’t consider the intention of the film that even the detracting voices you’re pulling from seem to understand

[soundchaser]

I spent the better part of the last year leading a creative writing workshop as part of my job, and one of my regulars (a published novelist, no less) was so stringent in his approach to prose ("I need to know where and when we are by the end of the first chapter"), and so resistant to my attempts to steer the conversation in a more productive direction, that it led to some members dropping from the group entirely. All of which is to say: the maxim-based approach to writing may help solve certain foundational issues, but equally, it can stifle the genuinely new and interesting. One of my attendees brought in a piece with an ending that was, objectively speaking, not set up by the piece as a whole, but it worked beautifully because the whole thing was about the way in which a change in context makes a difference in feeling.

"Great" art (to borrow one of Weber's terms) often twists or ignores these directives entirely. I also haven't liked the one Aster film I've seen, but I don't think it's because he doesn't understand ideas like "less is more." Films are not just plot delivery mechanisms.

[Mr Sausage]

I spent the better part of the last year leading a creative writing workshop as part of my job, and one of my regulars (a published novelist, no less) was so stringent in his approach to prose ("I need to know where and when we are by the end of the first chapter"), and so resistant to my attempts to steer the conversation in a more productive direction, that it led to some members dropping from the group entirely. All of which is to say: the maxim-based approach to writing may help solve certain foundational issues, but equally, it can stifle the genuinely new and interesting. One of my attendees brought in a piece with an ending that was, objectively speaking, not set up by the piece as a whole, but it worked beautifully because the whole thing was about the way in which a change in context makes a difference in feeling.

"Great" art (to borrow one of Weber's terms) often twists or ignores these directives entirely. I also haven't liked the one Aster film I've seen, but I don't think it's because he doesn't understand ideas like "less is more." Films are not just plot delivery mechanisms.

Yeah, whenever I hear "less is more" or a similar bromide, I just tally in my head all the foundational art that doesn't follow it. For starters, out goes Shakespeare. Out goes the whole baroque. Out goes most luminaries of the English novel (Richardson, Burney, Fielding, Sterne, Dickens, George Eliot), and many of the Russian (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bely, Grossmann, Solzhenitsyn). Out goes much classical literature (Homer, Vergil, Ovid). Out goes modernism (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Mann, Musil, Proust, Faulkner) and post modernism (Pynchon, Delillo, Gass, Coover, Barth, Nabokov). Out goes the Latin American boom (like, all of it).

Look at that, just a wasteland of exceptional talent and, in a lot of cases, stunning, even epochal genius. None of which even remotely fits that, or any other, truism.

[MV88]

I’m sure it’s just my own sensibilities and values regarding art, but I tend to check out whenever terms like “theatrical marketplace” are used and it’s implied that a director’s job is to “understand the viewing audience paying to see your movie.” I’m fully aware that that’s how people on the business side of movie production and distribution think, but insisting upon a concentrated effort towards broad accessibility as an essential ingredient in making a good movie just strikes me as such an anti-artistic, purely commerce-oriented perspective on cinema that, to me, approaching a discussion from it makes it less a conversation about film and more a conversation about the movie business, and I choose to cling to my (possibly naive at this point) belief that those are two separate things (personally, I think one of the worst things to ever happen to film discourse was coverage of box office numbers). I’m not familiar at all with Erick Weber, but I’m at least peripherally aware of Chris Gore. The only direct familiarity I have with him was a clip I tried to watch of him explaining what was wrong with movies today, and I tapped out as soon as I noticed he used the word “product” instead of “movie” or “film,” which as I recall was the very beginning of the video.

None of which is to say anything about Beau is Afraid, of course, because I haven’t seen it yet. But if I don’t like it, it won’t be because I think Ari Aster failed to tailor his product to me as a paying customer; it’ll be because what he was doing artistically didn’t appeal to me, which I may or may not feel strongly about, but even if I do I think I’ll be able to discuss it without getting on the “Ari Aster doesn’t understand that his job is to be a purveyor of cinematic product for the broadest audience possible” line of thinking. I can’t even imagine what the Chris Gores of the world would have to say about, like, Tsai Ming-liang or anyone else in the slow cinema movement.

[Monterey Jack]

I think it is being unfriendly to a paying theatrical audience when a movie is so long you'll be struggling with your bladder for the last hour. The new Scorsese being nearly FOUR HOURS with no intermission is insanity. No avid movie fan wants to put a hole in their first viewing of a movie by being forced to rush out to the restroom during a key scene. Even broad-appeal blockbusters are painfully overlong now. 165 minutes for Black Panther 2...?!

[Mr Sausage]

I think audiences now, precisely because they’re paying, expect something long and epic from their films. Otherwise they could just stream it.

[therewillbeblus]

It would be cool if there were more three-to-four-hour epics that brought back intermissions, including to non-arthouse theatres, but it's not gonna happen. With streaming, films are probably just going to get longer - people have no problem binge-watching entire series that drop in one day on a streaming platform, and I'm sure plenty of families watched Zack Snyder's Justice League across several intervals, or at least with breaks. It seems inevitable that the longer (3.5-4 hr) auteur films that get released that way (i.e. Scorsese's upcoming and last films) only will because they're financed by streamers, so a select few audience members who are willing to hold their bladders will check them out in theatres and the rest of the public will watch and pause at home. But no major studio is going to greenlight anyone's four hour movie without an intermission and put it in theatres-only. I think a more interesting questions is - is this a good thing? Some cherished filmmakers (and some new ones, i.e. Aster) are getting more leeway to deliver their vision, if funneled into select audiences theatrically and mass audiences via streaming, but if streaming giants are the big funders, what does this mean for the theatre industry - weighing the optimal effect of pure, unencumbered art against the optimal effect of the pure, unencumbered experience of ingesting art in a vacuumed context

[yoloswegmaster]

As Mr Sausage pointed out, half of the top 10 highest grossing films from last year all run over 150+ minutes, so the audience doesn't seem to think that it's too unfriendly.

As someone who drinks a lot of water throughout the day, I do sympathize with the comments about having to hold ones bladder but I find that there are ways to avoid situations like it. I just decrease the amount of water that I drink before the screening and I make sure to go to the bathroom just before the film starts, which actually helps out a lot for films with long runtimes.

[therewillbeblus]

Well, that was... interesting (I can't decide what punctuation to end that sentence with, but in the two hours since I've exited the theatre, my reaction has fluctuated between "!", "?", and ".", much like the film's tone). EWetc isn't exactly wrong when they say Aster is making something completely unhinged, but it's clearly intentional - though whether or not it 'works' is up for debate, and I wouldn't fault anybody for where they come down on it. Aster is certain to alienate a solid portion of his fanbase here, and not just because this isn't straight-horror. This is a lot odder than the trailer makes it seem - a Kaufmanesque internal logic, even something like I'm Thinking of Ending Things, might've actually fared better with audiences, because there are long, large chunks of this film that drag and pivot into places unprimed and, honestly, exclusive. Part of this might have to do with Phoenix's (literal) born-loser character, who doesn't exactly invite the audience into an appetizing surrogate mode the way Pugh or Collette did with their respective resilient trauma survivor vehicles. Phoenix is of apiece with them theoretically, but totally repellent, though that's obviously the point - he gives such an agonizingly introverted performance of a manchild who hesitates to engage in his life whatsoever. He's repellent to himself, the poster-boy of an ironically safe, clinically-inhibited existence riddled with anxiety, indecisiveness and low self-esteem. Phoenix is fearless, and his acting job will likely be mistaken for 'understated' and thankless next to the wonderful bit players with juicier, louder roles to play around in, but he's captivating (in the least attractive ways one can be) at capturing the existential paradox of discomfort, lodged under a life's history of conditioned self-fulfilling weakness.

Midsommar successfully sustained a tone of discomfort for embracing that disturbing feeling of being suffocated in a relationship or unfamiliar circumstance outside of your control, while Beau is Afraid loosely oscillates between social horror, wandering art-film drama, and several shades of deadpan, cringe, and absurdist comedy. It's those stages that 'wander' without a distinct mood attached to them that are most peculiar - and the film comes to an at-times excruciating-directionless snails-pace for more of its runtime than I wish it did, but there's no way that's by accident. Aster is doing a lot here, and he's in command, even when he's loosening the reigns by design. He begins with some Tatiesque world-building in a sandbox resembling surreal milieus out of an episode of Man Seeking Woman, before taking off into a modern Lord of the Rings quest to find unattainable finite catharsis, but eventually settles into an arrhythmic homage to comedic nightmare odysseys Juliet of the Spirits-by-way-of-After Hours. The absurdity of socialization is omnipresent, but it's exhibited differently than its artistic influences or even Aster's own comedic brand of films-past. The futility of connection or the intimacy we crave when trapped in psychological defenses is not only prescribed to these internalized conditions, but exacerbated by the competing of extreme emotions when we are placed with others who are also suffering. This is particularly demonstrated in the arc with Kylie Rogers, Amy Ryan, and Nathan Lane, whose respective contrasting strategies for processing grief and interacting with Phoenix steal the show (Lane's positive pet-names are gold).

Yet the film's most hilarious and devastating moment comes when Aster puts Kylie Rogers and Joaquin Phoenix is an actual room together, as their fatalistic lonelinesses don't break down softly but explode like a science-experiment-gone-awry. It's also where the film gets the closest at realising the tone I believe it's striving for: an externalization of uncontrollable emotional dysregulation. This is communicated with some strong set pieces that cue the audience in, but is almost always kept appropriately abstract and ineffable, as Phoenix's hold on what he's experiencing or feeling is out of reach. We get detoured fantasies touching on the inevitability of loss and death outside of our field of vision or power, a more centered theme of the burdens of codependent, anxious/avoidant attachment dynamics from generational trauma (no wonder Lane described this as a "Jewish Everything Everywhere All at Once" - not that this has a chance of drawing a fraction of that crowdpleaser's response), and a self-reflexive denouement that surrenders we are no match for deep-seated interpersonal guilt pummeling us into a paralyzing existence of Sisyphean distress. Sometimes these scenarios are curious -like the play-in-forrest arc- and sometimes they seem more focused and inclusive. But the economy of the journey is a mess, just like the inside of Beau's mind and his comprehension of the world and his identity, or lackthereof.

At least we get a sex scene that rivals Aster's last movie's in both disturbance and humor, though it's not in service of an idea as lucid as Midsommar's, and it knows it by the way it ends and how the pieces are literally disposed of.. but that's another interesting aspect about this film - Aster seems to be borrowing visual ideas from his past works and shedding sincerity to lampoon them as absurdist comedy, rather than invoking the horror they produced in their original forms:

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Notably, Collette's creepy spidermonkey ceiling position during her possession in Hereditary redone here with the intruder sweating as Phoenix bathes (an additional in-joke seems to be the very real spider disempowering the weak man's grip, which could thematically be connected to this film's depiction of weak men rendered impotent by ubiquitous outside forces - hell, Phoenix hasn't participated in life at all because he's afraid of everything from invisible germs to tangible connection via sexual intercourse); and the man ritualistically jumping onto the rock from Midsommar, where the carnage was emphasized, softly emulated with Phoenix's defense attorney being thrown onto a rock in the far-away distance for comedic effect in the final scene. I never read the script online, so I'm unsure whether these were ideas that originated in this script, pre-Hereditary / Midsommar, or whether they were added after his last two features, but it seems that the answer to this would determine the cleverness of their contextualizations vs. a situation where Aster couldn't bring himself to cut what he'd already done. If the latter, I wonder what ideas from this film (if it was indeed his first script) we'll see again in future projects, perhaps pitched with a different tone.

Anyways, this is a bold effort, and deserves props just for realising such a pronounced vision. I'm glad Aster didn't make this as his first film, since we never would've gotten what we have already from him. I'm not in a rush to see this again anytime soon, and the batting average of hit-to-miss ratio probably isn't great, but I love unapologetically messy regurgitations of artists' minds onto celluloid, and what does work really works, so this is my favorite movie of the year so far.

[jazzo]

Haven’t seen the picture yet, but here’s what I consider a brilliant marketing campaign, passed on my way home yesterday.

[therewillbeblus]

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Those two pictures next to the poster are actual ads Beau reviews near the end of the film (likely part of his mother's advertising agency, of which she was CEO)

[Mr Sausage]

This was wild. Martin Amis once called DeLillo's White Noise a beautiful anxiety dream. Well, this is a horrible anxiety nightmare. A ludicrous, comical extension of every small-scale fear, dread, and weakness into a perpetual assault by the external world. What surprised me was how often I found myself laughing. The movie is incessantly ridiculous. It's often a parodic extension of our most self-centred worries. Our worry that, really, secretly, everyone else is thinking about us, judging us, doing things specifically because of us. We're important enough to compel their scorn and rejection, their anger, violence, and retribution. What we have is worthless, and yet so important that everyone is rushing to take it at a moment's notice. Our own unplaceable guilt defines the behaviour of the world around us. The movie is every ugly voice in your head externalized as the voice of the world. The first section (capped, like every other section, with Beau rendered unconscious) is probably the most effective at producing a comically escalating nightmare. Once Beau hits the road, the energy dips somewhat and the techniques become less pointed and more repetitious. The movie becomes more opaque in what it's trying to say, but all the more fascinating in its growing inability to define its own reason for continuing.

I'm sure a lot of people will complain about the film's excessive length and narrative looseness. Self-indulgence has, seemingly, become a standard trope in this genre of absurdist, fantastical self-examination laid out on screen. The indulgence, while unnecessary on a strict narrative, character, and thematic level, is rooted in a concept of mind. Movies like this, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and Bardo, conceive the mind as this vast, disordered, symbolic landscape that's infinite, but also turned in on itself. The human mind is a total mess, basically. Beau is Afraid reproduces that on a structural level, laying out Beau's mind as a place both comically small-minded and yet wildly disproportionate, so much so that it becomes increasingly hard to even parse it, let alone order it or apprehended it as a whole.

Beau is Afraid could conceivably go on forever. Tho' the movie is long, the ending is still abrupt; it doesn't so much end as stop. There's no logical narrative development here--events just occur in a sequence. It's what Northrop Frye calls an "and then" story (to contrast with an "and therefore" story), a mode of storytelling common in genres like Romance (the one with knights and dragons, not Fabio) and picaresque. This kind of storytelling lets Aster and co. create an overall mood of endless, inexplicable permutation, a human mind unspooling and unspooling.

I thought this a terrific disaster. I can't imagine who the intended audience would be. I didn't even think I was the intended audience when I saw the trailer. I adored Hereditary and Midsommar, but the trailer made this look like exactly the pretentious, self-indulgent, out-of-touch mess I hoped it wouldn't be and that it kind of actually is. I hope Aster never makes another movie like this, and at the same time, I'm happy he made whatever the hell this is. I had a really good time.

[therewillbeblus]

Really insightful post, especially the bit about the film resembling the disorganized mind, and I agree that the absurdist comedy is at its best when social encounters all play into an experience like having a bad trip on drugs in presence of a milieu of people who are not on your wavelength and overly intrusive (taking those hallucinogen bits from Midsommar and extrapolating them into one's consistent state across their existence). When feeling vulnerable, naked, and afraid, one is ultra-sensitized to stimuli, and even if people engage with you "normally" (though, as we see here, nobody is "normal"), those encounters are still emphasized as "everyone is focused on me and I hate it" - which is a common therapeutic experience for people with Beau's degree of anxious symptoms. The therapist's role in the film made me laugh the hardest -from his ridiculous probing questions at the start, so his later presence, which is the best impression of the elderly couple's dispositions in Mulholland Dr. I've seen since that film's release

[black&huge]

I was hit pretty hard by this. I felt it to be one of the most depressing and scary films I have ever seen.

[Forrest Taft]

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During the first part of the movie, in particular when the notes were appearing under the door, I was reminded of Barton Fink, and I think the film has a thing or two in common with the work of Coens. Their films are filled with scenes where horrible things are happening to the protagonists, to darkly comedic effect. The same thing is going on here, but Aster takes in several steps further, and what makes everything worse here, is that Beau is still treated as if he's wrong, as if all those horrible things are trivial. I kept thinking how glad I am not to be suffering from anxiety, but Aster certainly stirred up some intense fellings in me as the film progressed.

Scorsese has compared the release of this to Barry Lyndon, but the Kubrick I was reminded of is Eyes Wide Shut, for purely superficial reasons. That film is one of Kubrick's best, but in the middle of it is the most tedious scene in all his films. I'm thinking of the one where Kidman and Cruise is smoking pot, an endless scene I don't connect with t all. Beau is Afraid had a couple of scenes I failed to connect with, and in those moments I wished the film to pick up it's pace. I have no interes in watching a four-hour cut of this film, and I'm not sure I would ever watch it again. But I do think this is a wonderful movie. I was thinking that one of it's flaws was that the first 45 minutes are much stronger than the rest, but I'm not sure if that's true, I probably just found that section more enjoyable because the vision hadn't become truly nightmarish yet, thus I was enjoying it more, without feeling terrible.

[black&huge]

regarding the cast of the film...

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is there any word on who exactly played the angel from the outdoor play assuming it's the same actor who also played the angel in Beau's fantasy and was the actor that picked up Beau on the side of the road to deliver him to his mother's someone notable? I feel like they looked familiar

[aox]

I haven't seen this film yet even though it's my most anticipated this year. Life has just gotten in the way.

My question though is: has anyone bothered to watch Aster's first attempt at creating this story with his short, Beau?

I'm not an obsessive avoider of spoilers like most others are, but would this give away too much of the mystery of Beau is Afraid? Is there even much mystery to BiA, or is it just a wild road movie? Is the short mostly just a curiosity to watch after BiA?

[dekadetia]

My question though is: has anyone bothered to watch Aster's first attempt at creating this story with his short, Beau?

The Beau short is essentially one elongated scene from the first act of the feature (and it's not note-for-note at that, though some specific moments end up in the feature in almost identical form). I wouldn't consider it much of a spoiler.

[brundlefly]

The short is a very modest version of the opening segment of the feature. A thin dress-rehearsal. I watched the short after the feature, am fine having done that.

Of his shorts, I most enjoyed how he staged a couple lengthy monologues. "C'est la vie" stars the same actor who appears

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as Birthday Boy Stab Man

in Beau is Afraid.

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One bit of his rant (“You know what Freud says about the nature of horror? He says that it’s when the home becomes unhomelike.”) could work as an easy summation of each episode in the feature. But also applies to Hereditary and at least the opening of Midsommar. A rule that's either correct or one Aster chooses to observe.