Felix van Groeningen (2018)

In the opening scene, David Sheff (Steve Carell) sits talking with a man whose voice is heard but whose face is unseen.  Dave says that he’s a freelance journalist, wants to discuss his crystal-meth-addicted son, and has two big questions.  How much harm are the drugs doing?  What can Dave do to help?  A ‘One Year Earlier’ title then appears on the screen:  you prepare for a description of how the son got into drug-taking and his addiction took hold.  But no.  The ensuing flashback starts with Dave’s son Nic (Timothée Chalamet) missing from home.  As soon as he returns, looking the worse for wear, his father drives him to a rehab clinic, where a medic tells Dave that Nic’s condition is serious.  The prologue also leads the viewer to expect a return to this ‘present’ once the flashback, however extended it may prove to be, has run its course.  This doesn’t happen either – we never discover who the invisible man was.  What purpose did the lead-in serve, other than to tell us Dave’s line of work (which emerges in what follows anyway)?   Outside the rehab facility, Nic throws a wobbly and refuses to enter the place.  Dave pleads with and persuades him to agree just to see a doctor.  A couple of screen minutes later, Nic has been consigned to a twenty-eight-day stay in the clinic – without, as far as we can see, a murmur of protest.

Here are two examples of the remarkable narrative incoherence of Beautiful Boy, which Felix van Groeningen directed from a screenplay he co-wrote with Luke Davies (Lion):  the script is based on a true story told in memoirs written by both David and Nic Sheff.   The action from the one-year-earlier point isn’t linear.  There are flashbacks within the flashback, to various stages of Nic’s childhood (he’s played as a four-year-old by Kue Lawrence, at the age of eight by Zachary Rifkin and at twelve by Jack Dylan Grazer) – and it’s anyone’s guess how far into the future the narrative goes.  I hadn’t a clue when a sequence showing Nic’s college graduation was happening relative to other events.  Felix van Groeningen’s priority seems to be to show the gruelling cycle of short-lived progress and desolating setbacks in the life of a young addict and his family.  The effect of this, in conjunction with the careless storytelling, is bizarre:  Beautiful Boy is both repetitive and bewildering.

For many years, Hollywood dramas whose young protagonists experienced behavioural problems or mental breakdowns conventionally blamed their parents, as individuals and as upholders of a particular set of ‘values’.  This was true of Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, no less true of Ordinary People a quarter-century later.  The parents often failed to give their sensitive kids enough love or (which was nearly as bad) enough outward signs of love.  This is not Nic Sheff’s problem:  he never wants for hugs or kisses or ‘love-you’s (and he gives as good as he gets).  Even so, his adoring father is primed for self-reproach.  Dave and Nic’s mother Vicki (Amy Ryan) separated when he was a young boy:  Dave winces when Nic expresses regret that his mother didn’t get custody because his father is too controlling.  That brief outburst isn’t typical, though.  There’s little evidence that Nic resents or has suffered as a result of living with Dave – and Vicki, in most of her scenes, is a brittle, hypocritical scold.  Dave is now married to lovely, supportive Karen (Maura Tierney), an artist and the mother of Nic’s two younger half-siblings, Daisy (Oakley Bull and Carly Maciel, at different ages) and Jasper (Christian Convery).  They all get along famously.

Those family melodramas of an earlier vintage tended to oversimplify the cause of, and solution to, the young hero’s or heroine’s problems – the solution sometimes took the form of virtually retributive action (as when, at the end of Ordinary People, the cold-hearted mother moves out of the family home).  Watching Beautiful Boy made me almost miss this over-explicitness.  There’s no psychological or emotional explanation of Nic’s drug addiction; van Groeningen has no interest either in exploring why such addiction is an issue for middle-class families as well as in economically deprived parts of society.  He simply describes Nic’s behaviour and its impact on those close to him.  Even that impact is limited:  frictions in Dave’s marriage to Karen as a result of his preoccupation with his elder son are contained within a single scene and have no repercussions.  A main message of the film is that no one is to blame.  These things just happen, even in the most loving families.  How often they happen is made clear in statistics that appear on the screen at the end, as proof that we’ve been watching a socially responsible undertaking.  We also learn from the closing titles that Nic Sheff, thanks to the love and support of his family and friends, has now been clean for eight years – ‘one day at a time’.

Screen descriptions of lives blighted by drugs are often tough to watch because the physical detail (in documentary or drama) is so grim.  Nic Sheff’s suffering is more hygienic – even aestheticised.  Timothée Chalamet made a big impression on many people in the decidedly exquisite Call Me by Your Name.  Although Nic’s situation seems to guarantee a shockingly raw contrast with Elio Perlman’s predicament, that contrast isn’t strongly realised.  To cast Chalamet as Nic is to take the film’s title literally and van Groeningen is reluctant to deglamorise him:  there’s no traction between the physical ugliness and mess of Nic’s condition and his father’s continuing to see and treasure his son as essentially beautiful.  Although I didn’t quite get what all the Chalamet fuss last year was about, he is clearly talented.  Besides, Nic’s the kind of role that gets an actor noticed – the character is almost continuously in extremis.  But there’s not much depth to what Chalamet does here:  the screenplay denies him any opportunity to root his portrait of Nic in a personality that marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and crystal meth (plus alcohol) are threatening to destroy.

Steve Carell gives a conscientious performance as Dave but the stricken expression on his face becomes wearisome:  by the closing stages, I needed to look away from this more than from Nic writhing gracefully into unconsciousness after his latest overdose.  In a scene with the youngest version of his son, Dave starts to sing to the child the John Lennon song from which the film takes its name[1].  He does so in a voice clotted with suppressed grief:  Dave has read the script – he knows what’s in store for Nic and himself in the years to come.  Carell has a much better bit when Dave, in intense exasperation, yells ‘Fuck!’ and throws his mobile phone as far as he can.  In a witty bit of editing, van Groeningen cuts to Dave rooting around for the mobile in long grass and asking Karen to phone him in order to locate exactly where it landed.  This reminder of the perils of OTT reaction is an unusual deflating moment in Beautiful Boy – and very welcome.

24 January 2019

[1]  ‘Close your eyes/Have no fear/The monster’s gone/He’s on the run and your daddy’s here/Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful/Beautiful boy …’