Meewella | Critic

According to P

Tag: Stephen McKinley Henderson

QuickView: Beau is Afraid (2023)

“I really thought I was gonna die, my whole life.”

Beau Wassermann

A darling of the A24 production company, writer/director Ari Aster’s third feature is A24’s most expensive to date, an anxiety-ridden, absurdist dark comedy that displays flashes of brilliance within its messy and often inscrutable three hours. Ostensibly about a man’s fraught journey home to visit his mother, Beau is repeatedly waylaid by strangers in a narratively loose series of surreal events in the vein of the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Though? This is not so direct an adaptation of The Odyssey but its influence is evident. Pawel Pogorzelski, who has shot all of Aster’s feature films, has his work cut out here as each sequence adopts a wildly different style, from the agoraphobic terror of a city block and a sitcom-bright house in the suburbs to a nighttime forest and a vibrantly saturated handmade landscape of cardboard set dressing — it must have been like shooting a dozen short films at once. The through-line is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as the neurotic Beau, though this is far from his best work as he stumbles through in dazed paranoia. More interesting are the repeated glimpses of his mother and his childhood as the source of his fragile state, with memories bubbling to the surface, often literally emerging through water. Presented entirely from Beau’s unreliable perspective, Aster provides little opportunity for the viewer to find their footing within this heightened reality — a challenging experience that some will relish. As the credits appear over an audience silently shuffling out of a vast auditorium, there is no question that Beau is Afraid is an audacious endeavour but it is hard to tell if we have travelled any distance at all.

6/10

QuickView: Causeway (2022)

“If it get dark now, you just ride it.”

James

Ostensibly about a soldier recovering from PTSD after a tour in Afghanistan, Causeway broadens its focus midway into a wider examination of trauma outside its initial military context. Within the space of a smaller film, Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry have the freedom to deliver understated and introspective performances as new friends trying to heal. The Louisiana setting provides an uncomfortable environment in its oppressive heat, but the slower pace of life also makes the sudden friendship ring truer. Lynsey is not presented lazily as merely a victim and her growth ultimately requires dealing with a past that she has sought to outrun. Free of fiery flashbacks — the frequently used cinematic language that inaccurately depicts trauma — Causeway instead presents the more innocuous impacts like memory loss and sudden waves of debilitating emotion. Observational rather than explosive, Neuberger’s debut feature might not be ambitious in its reach, but it firmly grasps what it touches.

7/10

QuickView: Lady Bird (2017)

“I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.”

Marion McPherson

An alternative coming-of-age film, the focus is Catholic high school girl Christine (who has adopted the name “Lady Bird”) and her turbulent relationship with her mother. This is an unusually well-realised mother/daughter relationship, in which they both know they love one another, yet their strong-willed personalities frequently grate. Saoirse Ronan deftly avoids portraying Lady Bird as quirky for its own sake, instead making it a believable element of her awkward teenage self-expression, whilst still anxious about the perception of her wealthier peers. Religion largely takes a back seat to the more human elements of the story, in what struck me as a female counterpoint to Richard Linklater’s films about male adolescence.

8/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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