"Beautiful Boy"

 ☆☆½ 

The family has been gone for a swim meet, and as they let the dogs out of the car and unpack the groceries they notice something is wrong. A pot outside has been broken. There is some movement through the windows. One of the kids, who isn't more than 5 years old, says, "I saw Nic." And just like that, the day becomes yet again about Nic, just as it has been for years.

The Sheff family has not had a day's peace since Nic (Timothée Chalamet) revealed himself as a drug addict and began seeking treatment. In his effort to save his beautiful boy, Nic's father Dave (Steve Carell) has become addicted himself, addicted to the process of finding, rescuing and paying attention to his son.

This is ultimately the point of Dave Sheff's searing memoir, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction, which chronicles the emotional toll that Nic's addiction to crystal meth (not to mention pot, alcohol, heroin, LSD and just about anything else you can inhale, swallow or inject) takes on the man who helped create the boy.

The movie version of Beautiful Boy is not based just on Dave Sheff's memoir, which I have read, but also on Nic Sheff's own memoir, Tweaked, which I haven't, and it is this ambitious film's unfortunate weakness that it tries to see the experience from both perspectives. Admirable though that may be, but leads to dramatic disappointment.

As it shifts back and forth from Dave's experience to Nic's, Beautiful Boy can't find a completely compelling narrative for either of them.  This is a film that means well, and that is carefully, lovingly made and even more carefully acted, but such caution feels safe. Narratively, it jumps back and forth in time, showing Nic at different ages and providing a gently glowing look back at what seems like an idyllic childhood in an expensive home in the middle of the rolling countryside of Marin County, the place where liberal rich people can go to be pretentious in private. The Sheff house is all wood and glass and rambling luxury, and what would have been really interesting is to see how this kind of millionaire's lifestyle, combined with the anger of divorce, affected Nic as a child.

Carell plays Dave as a passively sweet nice guy with a weird edge, laced with real temper and obsessive behavior, and there are tantalizing hints that he could have been a lot more than a 21st century Ward Cleaver. All around the edges of Beautiful Boy are indications of what the movie could have been, but director Felix van Groeningen and his co-screenwriter Luke Davies keep leaning in the direction of the old disease-of-the-week TV movies, where a famous face earned an Emmy nomination by playing someone whose seemingly perfect life goes off the rails and viewers are treated to end title cards underscoring the importance of supporting efforts to battle the illness.

And, indeed, that's exactly what the ending of Beautiful Boy provides, and throughout the movie brings in extraneous characters like a doctor played by Timothy Hutton explain a few important facts about the abuse of crystal meth, to drop facts and statistics that are meant to enhance the drama but instead bring it to a screeching halt.

So many luminous, golden moments of a perfect childhood are contrasted with the complex, roiling, raging person Nic has grown into, but there's no insight into why Nic's bucolic upbringing led him to become someone with such a deep, black hole of despair at his core.  Chalamet seems to have tried hard to understand it, and even though he spends most of the film looking and behaving with far too clean-cut a smile and swagger, he does find someone real in Nic, someone identifiable -- if only the filmmakers didn't keep cutting away from his story just when it was getting interesting.

Back and forth, back and forth, Beautiful Boy swings between past and present, between son and father, between addiction and obsession, never settling down long enough to let us feel fully connected to either one.  It's not until about 90 minutes in that Beautiful Boy finally achieves something of the raw power it has been hoping to convey, as Nic comes back to the family home while everyone else is away. A strung-out girlfriend in tow, Nic is looking for things to steal, for anything he can sell for some money to get a quick fix. It's the latest of many relapses for him, and Chalamet plays him with little remorse or pity. Then, just as he's about to flee with a few items in hand, the family comes back.

No one is sure what to do. Dave is disappointed after so many attempts to help his son, but stepmom Karen (Maura Tierney) is filled with an anger she hasn't yet shown. As Nic and his girlfriend drive off, Karen gets into the family minivan and drives after him, and a staggering range of emotions runs across her face as she pursues a boy she thought she knew, but who is too far gone to reach.

It's a scene filled with tension and devoid of dialogue; it's the first time Beautiful Boy presents emotions that really ring true, and it's a shame it has taken the film so long to find its center. It's also one of the rare moments in which Beautiful Boy doesn't try to explain to us what Nic or Dave is feeling or thinking. The film would have benefitted more from raw and painful moments like this one, instead of the fact-laden, earnest and well-intentioned but frankly dull approach it too often takes.




Viewed October 27, 2018 -- ArcLight Hollywood

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"First Man"

 ☆☆½ 

Ostensibly, First Man is a biography of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, a subject that should make for one hell of a good movie, yet this one is curiously aloof, as cold and distant as it depicts Armstrong himself. We may no longer live in an age of heroes, but is that reason to turn its main character into such a passive-aggressive bore?

It may well be that Armstrong was a man of few words, but First Man makes him into a constantly unhappy and vaguely bitter person, which doesn't give the audience much to work with when the outcome of the story is already known.

It's not that First Man doesn't get off to an exciting and perfectly pitched opening, with Armstrong testing the limits of his aircraft and himself as he heads ever higher and faster into Earth's atmosphere, then comes crashing down. First Man aims to put us right there into the cockpit -- and later the capsule -- with Armstrong, and that's the one thing the movie does staggeringly well. As long as he's airborne, so is the movie; the trouble is, almost all of it is set here on the ground, where Armstrong is glum, surly and almost always lacking in passion.

Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong with weird detachment; everything is going on in this guy's head, almost none of it showing on his face or in his actions. It's enough to frustrate his wife, played well but with almost stereotypical feistiness and headstrong independence by Claire Foy -- she's fantastic, but both the actress and the character only get to come to life when she's struggling and fighting against the impassiveness of her husband and his NASA co-workers.

The goal, it seems, was to humanize Armstrong by making us understand how deeply he was affected by the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Karen, but there's something missing in this characterization; his fixation on his daughter is more an extraneous plot device than an emotional revelation.

First Man has a big story to tell, moving both across time and (literally) space, with a great many characters -- which is another one of the challenges the movie's screenplay (by Josh Singer) can't overcome: There are just too many names and faces for any of them to register, especially with a constantly moving, jittery camera and choppy editing that make it difficult to follow who's who and what's what. The movie needs to resort too many times to on-screen title cards to tell us what's happening, and rarely makes any of it feel connected to the rest.

It's impossible to make a movie about the space program without recalling both The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, which is to the great detriment of First Man, because the comparisons are both apt and not complimentary.  Those movies, especially Kaufman's magnificent epic, took enormously complicated stories and made them comprehensible to anyone. First Man doesn't fare as well, which is most telling when it gets to the grim-but-necessary sequence that dramatizes the fatal Apollo 1 fire.

It's a defining moment both for NASA and for Armstrong, but if you don't know much about it, First Man doesn't connect it to the broader story. In this scene, as in much of the movie, the audience is expected to have some first-hand knowledge. The movie doesn't get anything wrong (one shot of the door to the space capsule, bulging and leaking smoke, is haunting), it's that none of the moments, even this one, seem to matter much. The entire movie lacks a certain enthusiasm, and is devoid of the adventurous spirit that you'd like to think motivated the astronauts as much as it did Americans.

Why did we go to the moon?  Why was it worth the cost in money and in lives?  First Man offers up a snippet of John F. Kennedy asking the same question, but has trouble figuring out the answer itself.  Perhaps it's telling that the most lively sequence in the film that isn't set in space is one in which protestors gather outside Cape Canaveral to decry the cost both in lives and in dollars of the space program. To the words of Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon," which angrily denounces the wasteful spending to get men to the lunar surface instead of worrying about what's happening right here on earth, First Man gets an unexpected zap of energy criticizing the very project it's supposed to be glorifying.

After the boundless energy of Whiplash and La La Land (both marvelous and exquisite movies), it's unexpected and disconcerting to see Chazelle struggling to find both the story and the meaning here. In the car on the way home from First Man, I found myself looking up at the moon, thinking back to what I had just seen, and, as a backdrop for the moment, listening to Bill Conti's score to The Right Stuff.  That's a hard legacy to live up to, and it's not so much that First Man is the wrong stuff, exactly, it's just that it's never quite entirely right.




Viewed October 13, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16

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