An earnest, relatively no-nonsense portrait of drug addiction, as seen through the eyes of both the addict (Timothée Chalamet) and his loving father (Steve Carell). Based on separate memoirs by journalist David Sheff and his son Nic Sheff, Beautiful Boy is a thoughtful but ultimately routine family drama. It lacks the usual drug movie hysterics, but do we really need another film like this?
Beautiful Boy
Directed by Felix Van Groeningen – 2018
Reviewed by Mark Tapio Kines
The best thing Beautiful Boy has going for it is Chalamet, who is consistently real throughout Nic’s various relapses and recoveries. He’s excellent. Carell, usually so funny and warm, here looks merely pious and pained, an El Greco saint ever-tortured by his prodigal son’s lies and disappearances. And indeed, his David Sheff is depicted as quite saintly, a wonderful dad who’s doing everything he can to help his child. Ironically, the trailer for this film is cut to suggest that David is at least partly to blame for Nic’s emotional issues, but the film itself gives him a pass: when Nic states, at an AA meeting, that drugs and alcohol aren’t the problem but merely his attempt to fix the problem, we’re left to wonder what Nic’s problem actually is. The film doesn’t address it: we’re told he was simply a smart, lovely kid with great potential, who for some unknown reason started doing hardcore drugs, and that ruined everything.
The film itself is simultaneously too specific – this is the story of the Sheffs, people you’ve never heard of before – and too generic – this is the story of everyone who has an addict in the family. As it unfolds often non-chronologically, we’re not sure when it’s taking place (presumably the early 2000s; the real Nic Sheff was born in 1982), or how many years are going by. Maybe this is Van Groeningen’s intention, to reflect the time lost to addiction, but I found it distracting. And David Sheff’s Marin house, so prominent on screen, looks fabulously expensive. Was he a successful enough journalist by the 1990s (he has written for Rolling Stone and The New York Times) that he could afford such an amazing place, or is this just a “movie house”, eye candy for the audience?
Beautiful Boy isn’t bad at all. Yet for the seriousness of its message – and make no mistake, this is a message movie – it is curiously inessential.
> Playing at ArcLight Pasadena, and Pacific Theatres Glendale 18.
Mark Tapio Kines is a film director, writer, producer and owner of Cassava Films. You can reach Mark here.
Mr. Kines is really out of touch with the “common folk” and apparently knows next to nothing about drug addiction. The movie or the trailer never blames Nic’s dad for the emotional problems Nic has, and more importantly, it never blames Nic’s emotional problems for his addiction. That’s because neither are the cause of his addiction. The cause is spiritual as Nic explains in his testimony. I guess Mr. Kines was not listening then. The whole point of the movie was to show that no matter how good parents are, or how hard parents try, they can’t stop their children from doing drugs after a certain age if that child decides he’s going to do them. But parents always blame themselves, and feel ashamed and humiliated, but it is not their fault and it is beyond their control. That is the aha moment that Nic’s father arrives at after doing all he can to try and save his son. He finally realizes that only Nic can save himself. Contrary to what Mr. Kinds intimates, Nic’s Dad never saves his son. Nic does. It is a warning to all parents. No matter how close you are to your child and no matter how much you think you know about them – they are independent individuals who have to make their own choices in life. And no matter how much you warn them about drugs and no matter how good an example you provide them, they can still decide to do the wrong thing. So the warning is this: just because you work hard and earn money so that your child lives in a decent neighborhood and has decent friends; just because he is very smart and is “beautiful”, doesn’t mean he will choose to stay the course and keep away from drugs. Even beautiful kids, who grow up in beautiful families, and live in beautiful neighborhoods, are human beings and make bad choices. It reminds me of Dylan’s line in “it’s alright ma” -Darkness at the break of noon shadows even a silver spoon. That’s why the movie scenes are so beautiful, the people are beautiful, the beaches are beautiful, the mountains are beautiful, everything is beautiful and no one can believe something like drug addiction can happen to them or anyone in their family, but it can and it does.