BEFORE: It's the last film of my Long-Movie Weekend, thank God, and Joaquin Phoenix carries over from "Napoleon". Really, it was my own mistake to let the chain schedule Long-Movie Weekend around the same time as Orientation Week at the theater. The theater is run by a college, after all, and today was the first official day of orientation, freshmen are at the school for their first few events, and I guess that means classes start soon - get busy on making your art, kids! But that meant I had to be at the theater at 8:30 am on a Sunday, to accept delivery of a giant ostrich sculpture (long story, plus it wouldn't mean anything to you, just another indication of how crazy my life can get sometimes).
Yeah, so after finishing "Beau Is Afraid", on Saturday night, I was faced with two choices - force myself to go to sleep for two, maybe three hours which would GREATLY increase the chance of me oversleeping, or just doze a bit, maybe take a short nap and hope to hear the alarm at 7:00 am and not just hit the snooze button, and then again, oversleep and risk getting fired. But it's OK, because my body had a plan that would allow me to get to work this morning on time - I was so stressed out over the possibility of over-sleeping that I didn't really sleep at all! Problem solved, right? I can work an 8-hour shift on no sleep, I used to do it back in the late 1980's when working as a P.A. on music videos. Of course, I was a lot younger then. Look, I got to work on time today and did what I had to do, maybe had a few iced coffees, but that did the trick and I didn't crash during the shift, I got home at 5:30 pm and crashed then, woke up in time to make a quick dinner, now I'm back and ready to write my blog and get ready for Monday. I'm on an Orientation shift again on Tuesday, but I just won't watch a movie on Monday night, another skip day and I'll probably be fine.
THE PLOT: Following the death of his mother, a mild-mannered but anxiety-ridden man confronts his darkest fears as he embarks on an epic, Kafkaesque odyssey back home.
AFTER: Perhaps you've been reading my blog for a while now and maybe you think you've got a handle on what I look for in a movie, what kind of film do I gravitate toward? Or maybe you've realized that I tend to say this a lot: This is a very weird movie. I think that kind of undersells it, perhaps because I do say that a lot, but out of the past 4,800-plus movies that I've watched since 2009, this could be the champion, the hands-down weirdest film I've watched, and as stated, I do watch a lot of weird movies. That will probably be a whole category at the end of this year, movies that are just plain weird, but this is over-the-top, can't-believe-they-went-there, unabashedly and without reservations, super weird. At least it felt that way when I was watching it, that constant feeling of "Where are they even GOING with this?", and more often, "What else could POSSIBLY happen here?". It's that far out there, really, but if you want to confirm that for yourself, be warned that's going to take up about three hours of your day, so only do that if you like 'em good and weird, and of course "good" is subjective, but weird is weird. Like "The Square was weird, "Under the Silver Lake" was weird, but this is something else beyond all that.
I can only imagine the idea behind this - and it's from the same director as "Midsommer", which was another weird film, but that was a slow burn, and come on, they made you wait almost the whole picture before the crazy started to happen, and then when it did, hoo boy, LOOK OUT. "Beau Is Afraid" is wall-to-wall weird, from the start to the finish - and OK, as with many weird things you can get used to it, so if you go back and watch this movie a second time (but, why would you?) it probably wouldn't come off as so fantastically weird, but that first time through, when you just don't know what to expect, it goes off on some extremely unusual tangents. A lot of pieces to this puzzle, and I'm not saying that they're all going to fit together neatly, but those puzzle pieces form a big image that is just too far out there to seem reasonable at all.
Let me point out that the film is essentially in three parts, one covers Beau Wassermann, a man with apparently no fixed income or employment, and we first meet him in a session with his therapist, during which he is dreading an upcoming trip to visit his mother. Clearly there's some history or bad blood between Beau and his mother, and as his therapist points out, if you drank from a well and it made you feel sick, of course you might think twice about going back and drinking from that well again. (And to think I was considering saving this film for Mother's Day, that would have been a pretty effed-up holiday tie-in.). Back to his apartment, and Beau apparently lives in the most normal apartment in the craziest city in the world, there are random people doing all kinds of crazy things, like trying to jump off buildings, aggressively begging for money and according to the news, there's a man who runs around naked and stabs people. OK, tell me this guy lives in New York City without telling me he lives in New York City. But no, don't say it because I get it, other people need to think Beau might live in their town. But. come on...
Beau's been packing for his flight home, and he's all set to go, but he runs back to get his dental floss, and while he does that, someone in his building steals his luggage, and also his keys from his door, as he was in the process of locking up. Great, now he can't take the trip because he has no clothes, his passport was probably in that bag, and also he can't possibly lock his apartment door, so chances are when he got back he'd be all cleaned out. Perhaps he can get a locksmith to come and help him out, but that's going to take time, and he'd miss the flight. All of this triggers his anxiety, so he goes to take his new anxiety medication, which absolutely must be taken with water, and he finds that the water has been shut off in his building. It's almost like some writer was trying to envision the worst possible set of circumstances, and then just kept piling it on with one more thing after another.
So Beau needs some water, quickly, he's already taken the pill, but the water's been shut off for repairs, so he needs to run across the street and grab a bottle of water at the deli. But he has no keys, how's he going to get back in the building? So he puts a phone book down to prop the door open, and runs across the street, avoiding all the crazy people, and grabs a bottle of water, drinks it down. But then his credit card won't work, tries it again, no good, and so he starts counting out the $1.75 to pay in cash. But he looks back and sees that an enterprising homeless person has spotted the door propped open, and is entering his building. Counting out more coins, trying to reach the total, but more people are starting to enter his building illegally. This leads to a large number of homeless people taking over Beau's apartment, and he can only watch from a nearby scaffolding as a few dozen people eat the food from his cabinets, throw a little party and enjoy not sleeping on the street for a change. Oh, and then they totally trash the place.
The next day, he calls his mother to explain the situation again (originally, she did not believe his story about having his keys stolen, and seemed to be very disappointed that he wasn't coming to visit her on the anniversary of his father's death). But her phone is answered by a random man who says he's a UPS deliveryman who's investigating her house because of a weird smell. Yeah, it turns out he's found the body of Beau's mother, and apparently something heavy fell on her and crushed her head. Beau is frantic and more anxiety-ridden than ever, he still can't leave to confirm all this because no luggage, no keys, etc. And then while taking a bath he realizes there's still one more homeless person hiding in his apartment, and after a confrontation he runs out into the street and gets mistaken for that naked guy who's stabbing people all over town. So yeah, let's say Beau is not having a very good day. And then he encounters the REAL naked guy stabbing people around town, and it does not go very well.
In the second hour, Beau is recovering at the house of a married couple, Grace and Roger. Grace hit the naked Beau with her car, and Roger was the doctor who patched him up after being stabbed. They have a bratty Gen Z daughter, Toni, who doesn't like the fact that her parents have taken in a stray wounded person who is sleeping in HER bedroom, and seems to be taking the place of her late brother, who died while serving in the military. They also care for an unstable veteran who knew their son, but who suffers from PTSD, and apparently lives in half of an RV that is attached to their house. The couple offer to deliver Beau to his mother's funeral, which is apparently being held off until Beau can get there, but then they keep coming up with either medical reasons or scheduling conflicts, so it doesn't seem like they're ever going to drive him there. Toni finally can't take the new stranger living in her parents' house for one second longer, and this leads to a disastrous confrontation, and Beau is suddenly on the run for something he didn't do, and he ends up hiding in a forest with a bunch of other people who are orphaned from society, and they run a theater company in the woods where they put on stage plays. Yeah, this weird film suddenly gets a lot weirder when Beau recognizes that their play is somehow about him, which is impossible because they don't know him at all, and also then his memory seems to change to resemble the stage play, or something like that, it's all a bit confusing to be honest.
Then that unstable veteran shows up, hunting for Beau, and well, that doesn't go well either. However Beau had met another man watching the stage-play who recognized him, and kind of suggested that maybe Beau's father isn't dead after all. Curiouser and curiouser, but at some point here the whole movie starts to resemble someone's dream, perhaps Beau's, and sometimes our dreams just don't make any sense, and sometimes they go on for hours and change part of the way through, so suddenly everything is different and what was true at the start is now false, or vice versa, or the dream changes so much that the ending does not logically seem to follow the beginning. The whole middle part is very dream-like, in that sense, I certainly could no longer tell what the truth was.
I'm not even going to get into the final third of the movie, because spoilers, but at some point Beau started to remember repressed memories, some were about taking a cruise with his mother after his father's death and meeting a young girl named Elaine and having his first kiss with her. Beau said he'd remain a virgin and wait for Elaine, so remember that because it could be important later. Beau also has a memory that would seem to suggest that he may have had a brother who asked too many questions about what happened to their father, and after that he was never seen again. But these are dreams-within-dreams, I think, so perhaps they're not meant to be real or believable. Or, are they? You'll have to reach the third hour of the movie, just like I did, to find out more.
There's just nothing to compare this to, because so many, many things go wrong for Beau over the course of this movie, and he maybe finds out by going to his mother's funeral that nothing he was ever told was true. Who's to say what's true, anyway? If somebody tells you something and you believe it, and have no evidence to the contrary, isn't that true enough? If you never even try to find out that everything in your life is a lie, wasn't it all true for you, on some level? And when you have those three-hour long dreams every night, you know, the ones that stick with you for about five minutes after you wake up, and you say, "Huh, that was crazy!" before you start to forget about it, what the hell happened there?
But I've just seen this film described as "Kafka-esque" - geez, I wish I knew more about Kafka so I could weigh in on that, but I only know the story where that guy woke up and found himself turned into a giant cockroach, and that doesn't seem relevant here. Maybe Kafka wrote more about weird events and the futility of life, dream-states or such maybe. But really this is about how much bad stuff can happen to ONE person over the course of, what, a week? And also over his whole life, and this brings to mind the Book of Job, also the trip to try and get to his mother's funeral calls to mind other stories like "The Odyssey", where there's a clear destination and then the author just keeps the main character from getting there, for as long as possible. See also "Tristram Shandy", Mark Twain, Voltaire's "Candide" and maybe the movie "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World". Then there's a bit at the end that maybe calls to mind "The Truman Show" or "Defending Your Life".
Looking back on my day today, I was working on no sleep, so that altered my perceptions of things quite a bit perhaps. This is perhaps appropriate, I watched this three-hour dreamlike very crazy film last night, and then today I had a crazy day myself. Sure, let's start with the ostrich sculpture and then move on from there. I had some good ideas about how to get the very tall piece of art inside, because I'd grown up watching my dad move freight as a truck driver, and really, if you needed somebody to pack a truck or move a very oddly-shaped object, my dad was THE MAN. I must have picked up something from him, because I may not have done the lifting, but I advised two delivery guys how to tilt the ostrich diagonally to get it in the front door, and then how to tilt it a different way to get it in the small elevator that would take it to the stage. How did I know it would fit? I don't exactly know, but thanks, Dad. The screenings got a little crazy, getting 260 clueless students checked in and seated always is, but nothing we couldn't handle. I know the teacher who was doing the presentation for the incoming students, he's a bit of a wild card, does his own thing, doesn't really follow the rules, but hey, he's an artist, and I have some experience working with those. The capper of the day was that someone came off the bus and told me there was a guy in the garden area next to the theater and he was, well, umm, jacking it. Great. I told our security guard right away and let him deal with it, I didn't need a random encounter with a crazy man with no pants on putting on a show for the freshman students. But hey, welcome to New York, kids!
Also starring Patti Lupone (last seen in "The School for Good and Evil"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Worth"), Nathan Lane (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Kylie Rogers (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Denis Ménochet (last seen in "The Mauritanian"), Parker Posey (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Zoe Lister-Jones (last seen in "How It Ends"), Armen Nahapetian, Julia Antonelli, Stephen McKinley Henderson (last seen in "Bruised"), Richard Kind (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Hayley Squires (last seen in "A Royal Night Out"), Julian Richings (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Bill Hader (last heard in "Belushi"), Alicia Rosario, James Cvetkovski, Catherine Bérubé, Stephanie Herrera, Bradley Fisher, Peter Seaborne, Michael Esper (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Manuel Tadros (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Karl Roy, Marc-Nadre Brisebois, Tyrone Benskin (last seen in "Pieces of a Woman"), Ernest-James Chupka, Archie Madekwe (last seen in "Gran Turismo"), Greg Halpin, Luis Oliva (last seen in "Fatherhood"), Charles Hardy, Marie-Michelle Garon, Maev Beaty, Patrick Kwok-Choon, Michael Gandolfini (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Théodore Pellerin (last seen in "Boy Erased"), Mike Taylor, KWasi Songui (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"), Tristan D. Lalla (ditto), Arthur Holden (ditto), Sylvain Landry (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Anana Rydvald, John Walsh, Lee Villeneuve (last seen in "Death Wish"), Julien Fortin, with a voice cameo from David Mamet.
RATING: 4 out of 10 employee ID badges
No comments:
Post a Comment