Beautiful Boy (2018)
Directed by Felix van Groeningen
After he and his first wife separate, journalist David Sheff struggles to help their teenage son, who goes from experimenting with drugs to becoming devastatingly addicted to methamphetamine.
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25 films that influenced Beautiful Boy
What critics say influenced Beautiful Boy
When compared to something as brutal as Requiem For a Dream , Beautiful Boy appears hesitant to travel a similar path, despite hitting several similar narrative beats.
Regardless of what’s happening on screen, Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet are aching portraits of genuine suffering; minor faults aside Beautiful Boy is the best film chronicling drug addiction since Darren Aronofsky’s masterpiece Requiem for a Dream.
But unlike knockout experiences, such as “Trainspotting” (1996) or “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), this feels like a two-hour PSA with an abrupt finish and preachy end credits.
From Trainspotting to The Panic in Needle Park to Requiem for a Dream , that vicious cycle that sucks users in to a living hell is given all kinds of depictions.
“The story of a middle-class Californian kid who gets addicted to crystal meth, then bounces between rehab, relapses and overdoses for the rest of the film” sounds like a wearisome, derivative experience — like Requiem for a Dream, but with better decor.
Beautiful Boy's fragmented narrative is not detrimental to the story, but if you are expecting the grit of Requiem for a Dream or Christiane F, don't.
It was about fathers and sons, too, back in 1957 when Lloyd Nolan, the father in "A Hatful of Rain" told his addicted war veteran son Don Murray that he loved him.
Timothy Hutton also has what feels like an appropriate cameo, given the similarities between this film and “Ordinary People,” which also dealt with the struggles of an upper-middle-class family through a troubled son and his confused parents.
Beautiful Boy opens with David’s visit to an unseen authority on drug addiction who turns out (in later scenes) to be played by Timothy Hutton — a nice reveal given Hutton’s triumph as the maladapted teenager in Ordinary People , but amounts to little more than an in-joke.
Back in 1980 Hutton, the Chalamet of his day, also played the disturbed son of a middle-class family in Ordinary People, winning him an Oscar (and one for director Robert Redford).
Gibson’s sensitive shock recalls a second chapter of Anthony Michael Hall’s character in The Breakfast Club .
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Playing a down-and-out drug addict is a rite of passage for a young actor, from Al Pacino in "The Panic In Needle Park" to Robert Downey Jr. in "Less Than Zero" to Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Basketball Diaries."
From Trainspotting to The Panic in Needle Park to Requiem for a Dream , that vicious cycle that sucks users in to a living hell is given all kinds of depictions.
But unlike knockout experiences, such as “Trainspotting” (1996) or “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), this feels like a two-hour PSA with an abrupt finish and preachy end credits.
But there are films — 1996’s Trainspotting comes to mind — which portray the appeal of the addict’s dream world while still acknowledging the habit will only exacerbate the nightmare.
From Trainspotting to The Panic in Needle Park to Requiem for a Dream , that vicious cycle that sucks users in to a living hell is given all kinds of depictions.
Any parents paranoid that their teenager’s first joint might buy them a one-way ticket on the Trainspotting Express are advised not to take even the smallest toke on Beautiful Boy , and certainly not to inhale.
Unlike earlier iconic films on addiction— Days of Wine and Roses, The Lost Weekend, The Man With the Golden Arm and Trainspotting , among others—it’s not groundbreaking, eye-opening or even titillating.
Playing a down-and-out drug addict is a rite of passage for a young actor, from Al Pacino in "The Panic In Needle Park" to Robert Downey Jr. in "Less Than Zero" to Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Basketball Diaries."
After all, the pained-young-artist-as-junkie trope arguably peaked with The Basketball Diaries, and Chalamet's tousel-haired and doe-eyed performance adds little to the equation.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of Beautiful Boy is swathed in popular music accompaniment; whatever it is, it’s a lot, with some of it seeming like time wasting for the sake of mood and a few achieving unusual poignant effects, notably an unexpectedly gorgeous Perry Como version of “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof.
A couple of musical cues — particularly the use of Fiddler on the Roof ’s “Sunrise, Sunset” in one emotionally wrought montage — feel heavy-handed, as if we have to be told how to feel even after we’ve spent so long with these characters.
Other than Nic's occasional bouts of vivaciousness, the closest the film comes to wry, is with the director's a bit on-the-nose music cues (the most blatant of which involves a certain famous ditty from Fiddler on the Roof ).
The movie for more than two hours tracks Nic's steps towards apparent recovery and the relapses made along the way, accompaned all the while by an eclectic soundscape (Henryk Górecki gets a real workout) that includes surely the oddest use ever of the wedding song "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof .
He mostly keeps the story on the right side of melodrama (although a snippet of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof is risibly schmaltzy), but the psychodrama leans too hard on Nic's upbringing to pin down why Nic becomes a junkie.
When “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof kicks in, I could picture Steve Carell and Maura Tierney sharing a duet while staring at their children’s photographs.
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Even the best of them — Billy Wilder's 1944 "The Lost Weekend," with Ray Milland dragging his typewriter up Third Ave. to hock it for the price of a drink, or Otto Preminger directing Sinatra as 1955's "The Man with the Golden Arm" — come off as less than the whole story to this survivor of a household ruled by a mean drunk of a British father.
He’s like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” or Montgomery Clift in “A Place in the Sun” or even Tony Perkins in “Psycho.”