Few American directors have made a movie as important as Hereditary (2018), so Ari Aster deserves our attention with each new output. But his newest release, Beau Is Afraid, falls well short of his best. In fact, given his also-disappointing intervening film, Midsommar (2019), I’m beginning to wonder whether he can ever reassume the heights of his debut.
Execution has never been a problem for Aster. Scene after scene in Beau Is Afraid is well shot and well acted, and many bits are quite funny. The problem is concept. Like Midsommar, the new film falls flat because it dabbles in surrealism without offering the benefits of surrealism. It presents metaphorical, narratively challenging content—but its underlying ideas lack complexity and therefore don’t warrant the challenging style. In other words, Aster, for the second straight time, has provided the worst of both worlds: a film that’s at once too narratively abstract and too thematically simplistic.
The first section of the film, the strongest by far, hints at a contemporary Eraserhead (1977), a paranoid urban nightmare for the 2020s. But even here, there’s a lack of visual verve that suggests that Aster isn’t totally committed to nightmarishness—that, unlike David Lynch, he’s a tourist in the dreamscape. And indeed, after the first act, the absurdist elements gradually fade away. The source of Aster’s inconsistency soon becomes evident: he doesn’t care about the nightmare; he cares about where it came from. He has de-prioritized filmmaking, prioritized psychologizing. An unacceptable flaw that pervades the entire film.
Recall that Aster at his best has captured scenes like Toni Collette’s dinner table eruption in Hereditary. In that film, the family strife felt primitive and scary: it felt real. The latter half of Beau Is Afraid, on the other hand, feels like a bad play, with characters airing grievances in icy, contemptuous monologues. This is weak stuff. The movie’s finale, in which Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) literally goes on trial for being a bad Jewish son, is the inevitable letdown the film has been racing toward. Aster, having started at Lynch, has ended at Woody Allen. Not a favorable trajectory.
I worry that Aster may have attained artistic and financial freedom too quickly, thanks to the success of Hereditary. Stanley Kubrick had to labor through Spartacus (1960) and Lolita (1962) to learn how to package his ideas into studio-financed films. Lynch had to suffer through Dune (1984). These were formative experiences not only because they offered lessons in industry tact, but also because they forced their respective directors to overcome resistance, to learn to squeeze more artistry into less space. Weightlifters have to train with heavy weights.
Aster, treated like a prodigy from the moment of his debut, may be atrophying.
–Jim Andersen
@jimander91
For more on Ari Aster, see my full analysis of Hereditary.