Ari Aster, the American writer-director of Hereditary and Midsommar, describes his sprawlingly picaresque third feature as a three-hour “anxiety comedy” – an archly surreal “odyssey of sorts” that is also an “elaborate Jewish joke” inspired by Greek plays and Kafka-esque paranoia. A rambling, labyrinthine, navel-gazing romp, it has narrative echoes of Tristram Shandy (both Sterne’s novel and Michael Winterbottom’s film) and an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic reminiscent of the chaotic Cinerama comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Personally, I think Beau Is Afraid is best described as an amusingly patience-testing shaggy dog story that asks: “What if your mother could hear all those unspeakable things you tell your therapist?” Parts of it are hilarious. Other sections sag. Some will find it insufferable.
Joaquin Phoenix, to whom Aster was significantly drawn following his career-torching identity-crisis mockumentary I’m Still Here, is middle-aged bundle of nerves Beau. Propped up by counselling and meds, Beau lives in a grim apartment amid a hellishly dystopian cityscape beset by bad plumbing, grubby crime and violent public nudity. He has an air ticket to visit his mother on the anniversary of his father’s death – a prospect that cranks his anxiety levels up to 11. But when car-crash circumstance conspires to make Beau miss his plane, he embarks on a long day’s journey into fright, encountering absurd metaphorical manifestations of his miserable life.
Beau Is Afraid began life as a short film that Aster made in 2011, in which the late Billy Mayo played a man attempting to exit his apartment who leaves the keys in the front door, only for them to disappear – with creepy consequences. In the feature-length version, which opens with a Tin Drum-style birth sequence (all muffled heartbeats and muted screams), this premise provides the springboard for a parodically self-reflexive affair (decapitation once again rears its tragicomic head) that devours and regurgitates familiar family-crisis themes from Aster’s back catalogue.
Escaping the claustrophobic confines of its source, Aster’s most unruly and indulgent film becomes a quixotic, tonally malleable splurge that expands into a rhythmically irregular shapeshifting personal journey. Each episode seems to exist in a different genre, from the taut, zombie-nightmare farce of the early apartment scenes, through the Todd Solondz-style urban sickness of the second act (“just a bad dream”), to the play-within-a-play theatricality of an extended hippy woodland sojourn in which travelling thespians strive “to blur the line between the audience and the players”.
As for the penultimate funereal farce, about which I have been laughing out loud for weeks, it combines the body horror of David Cronenberg’s Shivers with the cock-and-ball sensibility of an adolescent mummy’s boy enthusiastically scrawling graffiti on a toilet wall at school. Think Voltaire goes to hell via Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, unified by the one word that Beau’s therapist dutifully writes on his notepad: guilt.
Built upon the mantra that no idea is too outlandish (and that there’s no such thing as a cheap laugh), Beau Is Afraid presents a deranged melange of Oedipal angst, terrified misogyny and self-loathing male fantasy. At its best it combines the exuberantly manic energy of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love with the nightmare logic of David Lynch’s Eraserhead, while at its most tiresome it has tinges of Charlie Kaufman’s painfully contrived Synecdoche, New York.
How you react will depend on how funny (or not) you find a film that is to Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death what Woody Allen’s Love and Death was to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. At times it can all start to feel like a migraine – woozy, nauseating and very long. Elsewhere it has the sharp, psycho-slapstick twang of being smacked in the face with a frying pan while simultaneously stepping on a Freudian rake, or slipping on a Buñuelian banana skin. From a stabby killer who is identified in police reports as “a circumcised white male” to throwaway sight gags that owe a debt to Airplane! (a funeral caterer’s van bears the legend “Shiva Steve’s Grub for the Grieved”), there’s more than enough absurdist madness here to delight, infuriate and exasperate in equal measure. Bread’s Everything I Own and Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby provide brilliantly excruciating needle drops, while a joke about the soundtrack CD for Bette Midler’s For the Boys is so niche as to be almost subatomic. Enjoy!