Honey Boy
Alma Har’el (2019)
I went to Honey Boy knowing it was based on Shia LaBeouf’s life story, and came out wishing I hadn’t known. Ignorance would have let me see the film for what it is, required it to be self-sufficient. The knowledge that it’s an account of LaBeouf’s own youth, troubled relationship with his father and time in rehab, supplies Honey Boy with not just a referent but also a substance of sorts. Professional reviewers, needless to say, are well aware of where LaBeouf got the ideas for his screenplay: plenty of the summary reviews on Rotten Tomatoes focus on how successfully the film avoids being a vanity project and/or if it’s a form of therapy for its writer. Only he can answer the latter question but I think there is a vanity involved in LaBeouf’s reliance on foreknowledge of who he is – as a means of giving what’s supposedly a work of fiction a context and heft it mightn’t otherwise have. But this can’t be more than a suspicion since it’s impossible to unknow what you know of the material beforehand or to put this out of your mind as you watch. Particularly because Shia LaBeouf is there on the screen, playing the character based on his father.
Set in Los Angeles, Honey Boy moves to and fro between 1995, when the protagonist Otis Lort is a twelve-year-old child television actor, and ten years later, when he’s a movie star on the skids: after a series of violent, drunken misdemeanours, Otis is in rehab for alcohol addiction. The child Otis (Noah Jupe) is based in a grotty motel complex with his father James (LaBoeuf), also in attendance whenever his son’s on the TV set. A former rodeo clown, James is a registered sex offender with serious drink problems and anger management issues. His nearly continuous verbal abuse of Otis occasionally turns physical. Otis’s mother (Natasha Lyonne) hardly appears at all, although she’s a voice on the other end of a phone line in an upsetting scene where the boy is stuck in the middle, relaying his parents’ angry words to each other. In 2005, Otis (Lucas Hedges) is, most of the time, angrily resistant to the help his calmly-spoken therapist (Laura San Giacomo) and quietly tenacious counsellor (Martin Starr) try to give him. Otis is marginally more agreeable in the company of his rehab roommate (Byron Bowers). The only kind of physical intimacy that occurs in either half of the narrative is between the pre-adolescent Otis and a young woman (FKA Twigs), who’s a neighbour in the motel block.
Alma Har’el and her DP Natasha Braier often use a handheld camera, close in on the actors, and the effect is certainly claustrophobic. This may be designed to make the audience experience what Otis is feeling; what it does, rather, is cut the viewer off from the people on the screen, especially because the images are typically dark-toned, sometimes to the point of near-invisibility. With Lucas Hedges playing a young man undergoing therapy, the visual scheme naturally brings Boy Erased to mind: Hedges could be forgiven for wondering if and why his directors seem to want to hide him from view. For just his first couple of minutes on screen, you fear he’ll be straining to play an aggressive personality but he quickly adjusts (or you do) and gives a strong, convincing performance. His native sensitivity plays off against Otis’s aggression most effectively. Besides, Hedges has the imagination to get himself inside Otis’s head and skin – even if you never lose the feeling that, after Boy Erased, Ben Is Back and now Honey Boy, a break from psychological treatment for this fine young actor is seriously overdue.
Noah Jupe, thirteen when the film was shot, is accumulating thankless tasks even more precociously than Lucas Hedges: Jupe was Matt Damon’s son in Suburbicon and Christian Bale’s in Le Mans ’66, in which Damon also co-starred. Otis is this English boy’s best role so far, and you can see why he’s in demand. His emotional suppleness and unstressed vulnerability make it very credible that Jupe’s character grows up into Lucas Hedges, even if Otis’s potential for anger isn’t evident in his younger version. Shia LaBeouf and Alma Har’el, whose first dramatic feature this is, have worked together before: he was one of the producers on her 2016 documentary Love True, four years after starring in a music video that Har’el directed. All in all, it’s easy to understand how LaBeouf has ended up playing James in Honey Boy but I think it was a mistake. Children of whatever age tend to have a clear idea of who their parents are or were. When the material is as decidedly autobiographical as it is here, that clarity runs the risk of being limiting. Shia LaBeouf in effect prevents himself from using the imaginative sympathy that drives the work of Lucas Hedges and Noah Jupe here – as it drove LaBeouf’s in this year’s The Peanut Butter Falcon.
The photographs of the actual LaBeouf senior (as well as of the younger Shia) that Har’el shows at the end of the film suggest that she and LaBeouf have tried to replicate his father’s appearance. As in Borg vs McEnroe, the dissimilarity between LaBeouf’s facial shape and features and those of the person he’s playing creates a very different and perhaps distorted impression. There’s a humour in his father’s face that LaBeouf junior barely suggests, even he does deliver plenty of his lines with harsh wit. The film’s prevailing acridity ironises its title; when James calls Otis ‘honey boy’, his tone is usually ironic too.
The closing stages are relatively hopeful. James and twelve-year-old Otis smoke cannabis together, from the marijuana plants the father has been growing beside a highway. In 2005, twenty-two-year-old Otis, whose rehab is progressing positively, revisits the place. This sparks a reverie in which he imagines returning to the motel, finding his father there dressed in his rodeo clown costume, and telling James he’s going to make a movie about him. ‘Make sure you make me look good,’ James replies. The two of them then ride off on the father’s motorcycle before James fades out of the image, leaving Otis to continue on his way alone. This mildly upbeat resolution doesn’t remove the persisting sense you get through Honey Boy that the decade between the film’s past and present must have been full of misery and trauma for Otis Lort. Although you’re not ungrateful for this elision, you can’t help suspecting Shia LaBeouf thinks it justified on the grounds that his own troubles are already matters of public knowledge.
11 December 2019