Beau Is Afraid
[5][6] The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as the title character, and also includes a supporting ensemble cast consisting of Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Michael Gandolfini, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, and Richard Kind.Its plot follows the mild-mannered but paranoia-ridden Beau as he embarks on a surreal odyssey to get home to his mother's funeral, realizing his greatest fears along the way.Two days later, Beau awakens in the house of a married couple, Grace and Roger, who live with their angsty daughter Toni and an unstable veteran named Jeeves.[10] Aster has described the film in many ways, including initially as a "nightmare comedy,"[11] "a Jewish Lord of the Rings, but [Beau's] just going to his mom's house," and as "if you pumped a 10-year-old full of Zoloft, and [had] him get your groceries."[12] For an IndieWire Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Aster and his regular cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski discussed three key films that influenced their approach for Beau Is Afraid: Jacques Tati's playful, dense comedy Playtime (1967); Alfred Hitchcock's voyeuristic thriller Rear Window (1954); and Albert Brooks' allegorical comedy-fantasy Defending Your Life (1991).Kermode compared Beau Is Afraid to "Todd Solondz-style urban sickness", the "body horror of David Cronenberg's Shivers" (1975), "Voltaire goes to hell via Darren Aronofsky's Mother!"(2017), the "exuberantly manic energy of Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love" (2002), the "nightmare logic of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977), "Charlie Kaufman's painfully contrived Synecdoche, New York" (2008), and "slipping on a Buñuelian banana skin".[14] Sight and Sound also found Charlie Kaufman influences, and said various moments in Beau Is Afraid recalled Franz Kafka, Mark Twain, and the Book of Job.[2] The film's score was produced by Katherine Miller and composed by British electronic musician Bobby Krlic, who performs under the name the Haxan Cloak.The website's consensus reads: "Beau Is Afraid is overstuffed to the point of erasing the line between self-flagellation and self-indulgence, but Ari Aster's bravura and Joaquin Phoenix's sheer commitment give this neurotic odyssey undeniable power.[40] Writing for RogerEbert.com, Nick Allen gave the film three and a half out of four stars, calling it "gobsmacking, sometimes exhausting, always beguiling," and wrote that it was Aster's "funniest movie yet."[14] However, Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review found the film was an "epically pointless odyssey of hipster non-horror" and a "colossal recovered memory of mock Oedipal agony which is scary, boring and sad."[42] Manohla Dargis of the New York Times wrote that the film was "a supersized, fitfully amusing, self-important tale of fear and loathing," and chastised the run-time by saying, "It's a journey; midway, it becomes a slog."[43] Anthony Lane of The New Yorker also found the film's "nervous wreckage" and excesses were "wearisome", noting that the "movie is laid out in ontological order, as it were, from being to nonbeing.Writing for Vulture he said, "A superlong, super-crazy, super-funny movie about one man's mental breakdown with a cast better than Around the World in 80 Days: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Parker Posey, Nathan Lane, and Amy Ryan.