A scene from Icelandic TV miniseries “My Funeral.” Courtesy of MHz Choice
“My Funeral” (originally “Jardarforin min”) is a darkly funny Icelandic miniseries about a newly-retired man who, on the day he retires, gets some very bad news. But, first, an author’s note on this review: for those fluent in Icelandic, please excuse the spelling of the original title and names to follow. I don’t know how to type some of your language-specific letters, so this is the closest I could get.
This charming miniseries of six half-hour episodes covers a newly retired gent, Benedikt “Benni” (Porhallur Sigurdsson) who learns he has a fatally-advanced brain tumor. He rejects chemo and radiation which could possibly give him more time, but severely debilitated throughout. Surgery is an option, though his odds of surviving it are only 20%.
Benni has been quite self-contained. He’s known at work as a penny-pinching guardian of the company’s expenses. He lives alone. His new-agey ex-wife left him long ago to pursue an alternate lifestyle with her younger lover. His adult son, Bjorn (Evar Por Benediktsson), resents the old man who always seemed cold and distant. Benni’s only close friend is his work and golfing buddy Hjalti (Einar Gunn); and his only loving relative is young granddaughter Sisi (Birta Hall). Benni decides to enjoy some quality at the end, rather than shoot for quantity.
After a life of self-deprivation – financially and socially – Benni starts undergoing changes. More time with Sisi; spending money on pleasures he’d forgone, all in an effort to make the (almost certain) last few weeks of his life before the operation he probably won’t survive more meaningful than he’d ever allowed for himself. This further deepens the rift with his son, who wants the old man to help him buy a larger home with the money he sees Benni blowing on personal whims. Benni rants about how his son and that whole generation need to fend for themselves… like he and his did.
But the biggest indulgence is the eponymous ceremony. Benni plans an elaborate funeral for the day before his operation, so he can attend and experience the program he wants. From his perspective, it will be the first time he did something significant for himself. From almost everyone else’s viewpoint, he’s somewhere between insensitively selfish and just plain nuts. Sisi, Hjalti and the local reverend Olof (Ragnheidur Steindorsdottir) – who also happens to be the woman he pined for in his youth – seem to be the only ones who understand and support him.
The preparations are elaborate and not without glitches. The hassles from his son and ex are amusingly annoying. Benni also has a learning curve of self-awareness adding heart to the proceedings. Sigurdsson under-acts appropriately for one who has been virtually sleepwalking through an ordinary life until imminent death started generating new awareness and insights. Performances are excellent across the board from a very relatable cast. The comedic side is mostly more droll and bittersweet than belly-laugh hilarious, but the levity and sentiment complement each other quite nicely. If your eyes stay dry through the funeral sequence, you have a heart of stone.
“My Funeral,” mostly in Icelandic with English subtitles, begins streaming on MHz Choice on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
RATING: 2.5 out of 4 stars
A scene from Icelandic TV miniseries “My Funeral.” Courtesy of MHz Choice
Jeremy Strong, left, as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald J. Trump in THE APPRENTICE. Briarcliff Entertainment
It is not the old TV show but Donald Trump’s “apprenticeship” under his attorney and mentor Roy Cohn, the corrupt lawyer whose ruthless approach to the law did so much to make the young Trump who he became. Starring Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn in powerhouse performances, THE APPRENTICE is a making-of-the-man drama that starts out with a darkly comic bent but then shifts subtly to a more serious one as the relationship between mentor and apprentice shifts.
While the filmmakers are clearly not pro-Trump, the tone of THE APPRENTICE has a surprisingly neutral tone towards the people in the film, treating them as just people and letting events unfold without commentary. It even seems a bit sympathetic towards the young, almost naive Donald Trump as he encounters the legal pit bull that is Roy Cohn, someone often described as evil, then at the top of his powers as a New York fixer. But even Cohn is treated as a human being, just one with a very different view of ethics.
Early on, attorney Roy Cohn teaches his young apprentice his three rules, the ones he follows in his legal business. Number one: Attack, attack, attack, in every case. Two: Deny, deny, deny, no matter what the facts. And three: No matter what the outcome, always declare victory. Roy Cohn built that ruthless reputation in the Cold War “Red Scare.” Roy Cohn first made a name for himself as a relentless commie hunter for his role in prosecuting the Rosenbergs, and pressing for Ethel’s execution despite her being the mother of young children. He continued the hunt for suspected communists with a young Richard Nixon, and then Sen. Joe McCarthy. When McCarthy’s unethical methods fell out of favor, Cohn moved on to became a powerful “fixer” for corporate interests.
When the two first meet, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong of “Sucession”) is at his height as a powerful, crooked New York lawyer who was a mover-and-shaker in New York City, while young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is a small-time real estate businessman with bigger ambitions. Young Trump and his father Fred are facing federal charges for racial discrimination in renting apartments when the young Donald caught Cohn’s eye at a posh restaurant frequented by the notable and notorious, inviting the tall, blonde young businessman to join him and his party for dinner in a private room.
The meeting was an eye-opener for Donald, and he immediately sought out Cohn, despite his real estate dealer father Fred’s opposition to Cohn as a crooked lawyer. Young Trump chased Roy Cohn until the attorney reluctantly took the Trumps’ case, which he got dismissed through a combination of delaying tactics and a little blackmail, using Cohn’s extensive of “dirt” he continually collected on any and all public figures. Trump is hooked, although at first, young Trump is a bit shocked and taken aback by Cohn’s lack of ethics.
Sebastian Stan is having a heck of a year, starring in this film as well as the thought-provoking A DIFFERENT MAN, but it is “Succession’s” Jeremy Strong who steals this show. His Roy Cohn is perfectly sleazy but also hypnotic. Strong takes his Cohn from scary beyond words at the start but with a sharp intelligence and magnetic personality, to a sadder, eventually even pitiful as the power shifts and Cohn’s health declines, as he suffers from AIDS, which he always denied having, even suing anyone who said he was gay.
Roy Cohn makes a deal with Trump to aid each other and be friends, rather than having a paid attorney-client relationship, clearly seeing a useful potential in the tall, blonde, handsome young man to gain entry to spheres of power less open to the short, less attractive, closeted-gay lawyer.
Roy Cohn imparts to his apprentice his three rules – always attack when confronted with an adversary or obstacle, always deny no matter what the facts, and always declare yourself the winner not matter the outcome. Cohn follows this rule in his legal work but not her personal life, but his apprentice takes a different path. In the first part of the film, the mentor is in charge but tables turn in the latter part.
At first, Trump is Cohn’s faithful accollite, and Cohn even becomes like a second father to him, a more supportive one than his own criticizing father. The film delves into the Trumps’ family dynamics, including his father Fred’s harsh treatment of Donald’s older brother, Fred Jr. It also shows us Trump meeting and wooing Ivana (an excellent Maria Bakalova), following their romance and marriage, and it’s final souring, including a controversial rape scene.
The film keeps us grounded in historical events by giving us markers with little news video snippets, starting with Nixon and his “I am not a crook” speech, then Reagan footage and references.
Scriptwriter Gabriel Sherman and director Ali Abbasi strike a perfect neutral tone that lets the actors work their characters and events unfold without commentary, making the film more powerful.
This is an impressive film, one that treats the people in this historical drama as human, and even sympathetic at times, while being clear-eyed about the facts. That is no small feat, and boosted by riveting performances, especially by Jeremy Strong, this is a must-see for anyone to understand the man running for president, Donald Trump.
THE APPRENTICE opens Friday, Oct. 11, in theaters.
Brad Pitt, Austin Abrams and George Clooney in WOLFS, now playing in select theaters and streaming on Apple TV+. Courtesy of Apple+ TV
Brad Pitt and George Clooney team up as a couple of lone wolf professional “fixers” for clients who need a messy crime or accident scene cleaned up. When a district attorney (Amy Ryan) checks into a posh hotel with a young man she picked up in the bar, but then finds herself in a fix when he is accidentally killed after a fall through a glass table. Panicked, she calls a number she got from someone, for a professional fixer (George Clooney) to clean it up. Unbeknownst to her, the hotel has illegal surveillance cameras, and the hotel’s owner, determined to protect the place’s reputation, puts in her own call to another professional fixer (Brad Pitt). Both men only work solo and so are outraged that their two employers want them to work together to clean things up, saving both the DA’s and the hotel’s reputations. The professionals now have to figure out how work together to get the job done so they both get paid.
And survive the night, when the unexpected happens. It turns out the kid (Austin Abrams) in the hotel room isn’t quite dead yet after all, and it all gets very complicated in writer/director Jon Watts’ double-star action crime thriller, served up with a nice side of dark comedy.
Pitt’s and Clooney’s nameless characters start out as adversaries but both are forced to work together as complications pile up. Pitt and Clooney make a good team, and they are fun and funny together. There is plenty of snappy patter and a few wisecracks as this pair of characters, who both think they are the best and keep trying to top each other, find they have to stop polishing their own egos and get the job done.
As things get increasingly crazy, absurd even, there are twists, chases, and plenty of action. The action sequences feature quick editing and fine photography, with dashes of humor, sometimes aimed at the aging Clooney and Pitt, who occasionally huff and puff, out of breath, in chases, or winch in pain as one bends down to hoist a body. The action sequences are first rate and clever, particularly a long chase through snowy NY night time streets, in pursuit of a guy in his tighty-whities. There is a hilarious one at an Albanian wedding reception they crash, including Pitt and Clooney caught up in a folk dance. Plenty more wild, unexpected twists and crazy circumstances pop up, the more improbable the better.
For those who like action thrillers, particularly with a dark humor slant, WOLFS is great fun. There is a smattering of little movie references, with a bit of SOME LIKE IT HOT and BUTCH AND THE SUNDANCE KID among them. Sure, it’s just entertainment but entertain WOLFS surely does, with Pitt and Clooney, who make the most of every scene, giving a good boost to the absurd plot. It is pure fun to watch these two work together, and it sparks a hope to see them paired up again, in this or some other format.
WOLFS debuts streaming on Apple+ TV on Friday, Sept. 27, after opening in theaters on Sept. 20.
Jason Schwartzman as Ben and Carol Kane as Carla, in Nathan Silver’s dark humor yet sweet Jewish comedy BETWEEN THE TEMPLES. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor who has lost his singing voice, his wife and maybe even hope, whose life is changed when his grade-school music teacher, played by Carol Kane, becomes his adult bat mitzvah student, in Nathan Silver’s offbeat, darkly funny but sweet Jewish comedy BETWEEN THE TEMPLES.
After the sudden death of his wife, Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) has lost his singing voice, his enjoyment of life, and even, maybe, his faith. Unable to bear living in the house he shared with his late wife Ruth, Ben now lives with his doting artist mother Meira (Caroline Aaron) and his overeager, real estate agent stepmother Judith (Dolly de Leon) in the basement of their big home. Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), still keeps Ben’s position as the cantor at his family’s Reform Jewish synagogue, Temple Sinai, open for him, and is encouraging.
But after a year of mourning, his rabbi, his mother and his stepmother are all ready for Ben to move on with his life, and rejoin community life. Hoping to help, Rabbi Bruce pushes Ben to resume his singing as cantor at the next Shabbat service. Meanwhile, his stepmother Judith encourages Ben to begin dating – with some dates already waiting just out of sight as soon as he concedes it might be a good idea.
But the cantor isn’t ready, and can’t handle either. Despondent after the disastrous performance at the synagogue, Ben even lays down in the middle of a road, in front of an oncoming 18-wheeler. When the truck driver sees him and brakes, Ben urges him to “keep going,” to run over him anyway. Instead the driver gives the cantor a ride to a bar, when Ben takes refuge and quickly picks a fight with someone who looks his way, and gets punched. A quirky older woman comes to his rescue, helping up from the floor, a woman the cantor soon recognizes as his grade school vocal teacher Mrs. O’Connor (Carol Kane), the person who inspired him to have a career in music and become a cantor. The two seem to connect immediately, offering the first ray of light in Ben’s dark world in a long time.
But when the retired music teacher turns up the next day at Ben’s temple things take a strange turn. She arrives as Ben is teaching the bar/bat mitzvah class, the only thing Ben has managed to continue doing for the synagogue. Mrs. O’Connor announces that despite her Irish married name, she’s Jewish and her maiden name was Carla Kessler. Now a widow, Carla Kessler has gone back to her Jewish maiden name, and she wants to have the bat mitzvah she never had as a girl. She never had one, she explains, because her parents were communists, making her a “red diaper baby.” Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, she was surrounded at 13 by other children having bar and bat mitzvahs but she knew neither her parents nor the temple would even let her have one. Now the retired teacher wanted to do just that.
Although Ben was pleased to reconnect with his childhood music teacher, Ben doesn’t want to take her on as a bat mitzvah student, and tells her it is “too late” for her. Angered at being told she’s too old, she persists, chasing and hounding Ben, and when Rabbi Bruce intervenes and Ben gives in.
Rather than have Carla join his class of young students, Ben starts coaching Carla for her bat mitzvah one-on-one in his office. The process is supposed to take a year, during which she learns Hebrew and memorizes a Torah portion that corresponds to her birthday month. The two begin to share memories of her music classes way back when. Eventually the lessons move to her nearby home, and Carla also starts to coach Ben in breathing exercises to recover his singing voice. They trade off the role of teacher, and each gives the other support neither gets elsewhere. Ben teaches Carla, encouraging her Hebrew pronunciation, and Carla becomes his encouraging teacher again, as well as a kind of mother figure and a best friend who truly gets him.
BETWEEN THE TEMPLES debuted at Sundance to strong reviews. Director/co-writer Nathan Silver’s films are known for their sharp, witty humor but also for their emotion and heart. That humor is present here in abundance but the film also has a strange sweetness too in the scenes between Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. Those scenes are the real moments of magic, with a charm and appealing quirk reminiscent of “Harold and Maude.” The film also has good doses of screwball comedy, particularly in the scenes with family, as well as some serious things to say, behind it all. Things may look conventional on the surface but little is underneath.
While Ben and Carla are teaching and learning from each other, stepmother Judith continues arranging dates for Ben with “nice Jewish girls,” sometimes without telling Ben or even checking much on the girls. Meanwhile, Rabbi Bruce wants to introduce Ben to his daughter Gabby, who has recently gone through a broken engagement and will be back in town soon.
There is an undercurrent of poking fun at expectations. Ben keeps kosher and his faith means a lot to him, so his rabbi and stepmother would like to fix him up with a nice Jewish girl – a traditional match. But plenty is not traditional in his life, like his two mothers. His childhood music teacher, Mrs. O’Connor, turns out to be Jewish, and Carla Kessler becomes his adult bat mitzvah student, but she doesn’t even know what’s kosher. At one point, Ben even wanders into a Christian church, and engages in an offbeat, dryly funny chat with the priest, even asking if he, Ben, started believing in heaven, would his late wife join him there. “You might check with the Mormons for that,” the priest replies. It’s clever but respectful.
Jewish mothers play a big role in the film and how it came about. Carol Kane has said in interviews that she partly based her character on her mother, a vocal music teacher who re-invented her life after being widowed in mid-life. Director Nathan Silver has said he was inspired to make the movie after his mother Cindy Silver enrolled in classes for her adult bat mitzvah, something she never had as a “red diaper baby” like Carla.
Carol Kane and Jason Schwartzman have wonderful chemistry together. There is sweetness that is hard to describe and equally hard to resist, as they form an island of simplicity in the churning sea of complexity from both their families. Carol Kane is a delight in this role, giving a winning performance. Jason Schwartzman plays against his usual handsome leading man type in Wes Anderson films, by playing a slubby fellow, a bit gone to seed, with little purpose in life. It is the kind of role we are more likely to expect from Steve Carell but Schwartzman pulls it off very well. All the supporting players are wonderful as well, particularly Robert Smigel as Rabbi Bruce, delivering lines with deadpan humor.
BETWEEN THE TEMPLES is an offbeat comedy about Jewish identity that takes some odd turns but offers a surprising sweetness in the scenes between the two main characters, along with a strange yet somehow satisfying ending.
BETWEEN THE TEMPLES opens Friday, Aug. 23, at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinema and nationwide, and on Friday, Aug. 30, at the Hi-Pointe Theater.
Leonie Benesch as teacher Carla Nowak, in THE TEACHERS LOUNGE. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
There is something going on in the teachers’ lounge, which goes way beyond school walls, in the thriller-like German drama THE TEACHERS LOUNGE. With high tensions and a dark comedy undercurrent, THE TEACHERS LOUNGE is about more than the classroom, as the best of intentions gone horribly wrong. The powerful, jarring drama is also an Oscar nominee for Best International Film.
The story takes place in a middle school, where a series of thefts has the staff on edge but the drama is really a parable about modern society at large. THE TEACHERS also flips the expectations of movies about teachers, where the idealistic teacher breaks through the strictures of the school to triumph and change students’ lives.
In the teachers’ lounge of this nice but ordinary German middle school, the gossip is flying, particularly about the series of thefts taking place at the school. Idealistic young math and gym teacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) tries to avoid the gossip, and focus on her work with her beloved students. The chatter reveals that the teacher’s suspicions now are falling on students for the thefts.
In early classroom scenes, we learn Carla is a good teacher, caring and in control of her classroom. When students who did well on a test ask her to post the ranking of test scores on the chalkboard, she cleverly asks them questions to show them the downside of such public comparisons. Her warmth with the students and her idealism make her admirable, but set the stage for what is to come.
While Carla tries to steer clear of the other teachers’ speculations about the thefts, she is unwillingly drawn into the situation when she is called into a room by another teacher. There she finds the school’s principal (Anne-Kathrin Gummich) and some teachers pressuring two students to report on their classmates about who they think might be the thief. Alarm bells go off for us, and for Carla too, but despite her interjections letting students know their cooperation is voluntary, the principal and other teachers undermine that, first giving lip-service to those rights, and then pressing the students again. Uncomfortable, the kids assure the adults they don’t know anything but eventually, they point to a boy – who is the son of Turkish immigrants. Since the student said they don’t know, they likely just picked a student who is not well-liked. That it is an immigrant student is unsettling. Carla, as uncomfortable as she is with this situation, is now a part of it.
As an immigrant from Poland herself, Carla is aware of an undercurrent of discrimination and being labeled “other” herself, and sympathizes with the Turkish student. Hoping to prove Ali is innocent, Carla then makes her first mistake. She sets a trap for the real theft in the teachers lounge, counting the cash in her wallet and then leaving it in her jacket pocket, but with her computer camera on and pointed at the pocket. Then she leaves it unattended in the teachers lounge. When she returns to check the wallet, some money is missing. When she checks the camera footage, it does indeed clear Ali but what it reveals creates a whole new problem.
Carla is indeed idealistic and well-meaning, but she is also naive. She makes assumptions and mistakes With the best intentions, she did something she shouldn’t have, secretly filming the people in the teachers lounge,. Hoping to set things right, she keeps making mistakes which make the situation worse, and everything she does to correct that, makes it even worse. We’ve all had that day, that week, that month, where best intentions blow up and no matter what we do, things get worse. Everything Carla does just digs the hole deeper.
The story is told from her point-of-view, which means we don’t always know what goes on out of her sight. While early scenes showed us Carla is a good teacher, but as things outside the classroom spin out of control, so does her control of her classroom. Carla has a moral certainty but everything in the story is ambiguous. Carla identifies the real thief not because she see a face but by a distinctive patterned blouse. It is never established that she is the only one wearing that blouse that day, nor is it clearly established that Ali or another student is innocent. Instead, accusations and suspicions fly, with little proof of anything. Everything is ambiguous, but what is clear is that someone who was not a fault, Carla’s most promising student, Oskar (Leo Stettnisch), ends up paying the highest price,
The direction by İlker Çatak, who co-wrote the screenplay with Johannes Duncker, is as taut as the drama is tense. The acting, the tightly-controlled choice to shots, and the precision editing, gives us a sense of fear and dread that builds as things spin out of control.
The school says all the right things about diversity and treating students with respect but in practice it asserts control, making it clear that no matter what they say, the administration and the school structure that are in charge. What starts out as a private matter spreads throughout the school, and truly explodes with the student newspaper gets involved.
Director Ilker Çatak builds suspense and tension skillfully as the the situation’s complications grow and Carla starts to buckle under the pressure. Leonie Benesch is outstanding as the young, idealistic math and gym teacher Carla Nowak. Carla holds herself apart from the other teachers with her ethics but those same ideals make her inflexible and unable to see the fuller picture. Her idealism leads her to actions that are well-intentioned but not well-thought out, which do not accomplish what she hopes.
Director Çatak often focuses on Benesch’s expressive face, with her large, innocent eyes, as Carla’s confidence in her ability to put things right crumbles. As someone who has also been labeled “other,” she projects feelings into situations without truly understanding the facts. As things do not go as she hopes, her frustrations heighten and her confidence erodes.
Another acting stand out is Leo Stettnisch as her student Oskar, a shy but bright student. Oskar is torn between his fondness for the teacher who seems to recognize his potential, and his loyal devotion to his mother. Anne-Kathrin Gummich, as the principal, is a skilled player at school politics, turning everything to put herself and the school in the best light, and deflecting blame away from the administration, even if that means throwing Carla under the bus. Carla never seems to blame anyone for their self-serving behavior, even the person seemingly caught on camera, who responds to the accusation with over-the-top rage and a vengeful attitude that does not consider her son’s best interests.
Eventually, Carla becomes the object of accusations, not of the thefts but of being a bad teacher. Her control of her classroom degrades as the scandal spreads. We see early on that she truly cares for her students, that she is a good teacher, but her ethics and her idealism make her rigid in a way, and she wraps herself in a prim superiority to the compromising, more cynical staff around her. That inflexibility, that inability to engage with the realpolitik of the situation, contributes to disaster in the end. The ending is ambiguous too, except in one respect, that it is the innocent who will pay the price for this mess they did not make.
If you are looking for an inspiring teacher story who triumphs over the system, THE TEACHERS LOUNGE is not that. But it is a brilliantly-acted, beautifully-constructed, drama that is less about teaching or German schools, and more a symbolic commentary on a larger modern social system, one that is broken and cynical, that the wraps its prejudices in a cloak of tolerance and sensitivity, a cloak that often only really serves to cover one’s own posterior.
THE TEACHERS LOUNGE, in German, Polish, and Turkish with English subtitles, opens Friday, Feb. 9, in theaters.
Joaquin Phoenix as Beau in BEAU IS AFRAID. Courtesy of A24.
BEAU IS AFRAID – and confused and feeling guilty and often fleeing in panic, as he is caught in a world of bizarre events, in director/writer Ari Aster’s nightmarish fever dream of a movie, BEAU IS AFRAID. And mostly, Beau has mommy issues. This unsettling horror mind-trip, with a touch of darkest humor and surrealist fantasy, has the prefect star, that master of madness, Joaquin Phoenix, who plays an anxious, nervous man who might be prone to hallucinations who sets out to do a seemingly simple thing: visit his mother.
Craziness is afoot and there is plenty for Beau to be afraid of in Ari Aster’s BEAU IS AFRAID. The weird, imaginative and sometimes darkly humorous BEAU IS AFRAID is a squirm-inducing experience from a director who is scary good at creating unsettling movies, whose previous films MIDSOMMAR and HEREDITARY are striking examples of stylish psychological horror. While some films defined as horror are more bloody than actually scary, this is one that is truly scary, like the director’s previous two. BEAU IS AFRAID is masterfully-made, creative and often visually beautiful (particularly in a haunting fantasy sequence in the middle) and brilliantly acted, but it is a crazy, sometimes unsettling experience. While it is a creatively impressive film, it is not something for everyone, nor perhaps even an experience one would repeat.
Despite it’s nearly 3 hour length, it never drags and keeps up an almost breathless pace as the terrified Beau flees from one danger after another, and it is a tour-de-force performance by Joaquin Phoenix, with fine supporting work from Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Parker Posey and others.
In BEAU IS AFRAID, Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), an anxious, solitary man, is just trying to travel to home to visit his mother, but is beset by a host of obstacles that evokes the trials of a modern odyssey. But unlike Odysseus’ travels to get back to his loyal wife and comfortable home, Beau’s destination is to visit a mother with whom he has a toxic relationship. Sort of Freud meets Homer.
Beau lives alone in a modest apartment in an impoverished, chaotic and crime-ridden area of a big city, one that seems to be a cartoonish version of all the violent stereotypes of a crime-filled New York. Beau is seeing a psychiatrist ((Stephen McKinley Henderson), who prescribes a new medication with a warning of side effects. This therapy session early in the movie gives us a glimpse into Beau’s troubled relationship with his strong mother (Patti LuPone), as her timid only child. Although the therapist questions the wisdom of Beau’s plan to visit her, Beau is determined to see his beloved mother, on his parent’s wedding anniversary, which is also the anniversary of the death of the father he never met. On his way back to his apartment, Beau stops at a street-side vendor to buy a little white ceramic figurine of a mother and child as a gift for his mother.
Visiting his mother seems such a simple thing but everything goes wrong that could. A series of unfortunate events, starting with an alarm clock that does not wake him, prevent him from catching his plane. Calling his mother, he gets a response that suggests Beau has been unreliable in the past, which both doubles his guilt and resolve to get home. But even more disasters ensue, as Beau tries to make his way through a remarkably malevolent world.
The film starts out with such over-the-top absurdities and dark humor, that the audience is forced to laughter. But the laughter becomes more nervous and uncomfortable as the film unfolds, until it fades away entirely in the later part of this journey of delirious horror.
Beau is buffeted by multiple horrific events which increase his fear and often his sense of guilt, and generally send him running in panic. At one point, he is essentially trapped in the suburban home of a seemingly well-meaning couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who had accidentally hit him with their car, sharing space with their resentful teen-aged daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers), which shortly descends into an unexpected madness. A flashback to Beau’s youth, and a cruise with his mother in which the pubescent Beau (Armen Nahapetian) meets a girl (Julia Antonelli), gives insight on his toxic relationship with his mother (played at that age by Zoey Lister Jones), in a gorgeously-shot Freudian interlude.
The flashback is one of many with uncomfortable scenes skirting some disturbing stuff. The film purports to be an exploration of modern life and its challenges, and there are a host of awful forces surrounding Beau, starting with a crowd gather on a city street, who are urging a man on a skyscraper ledge to jump, and a corpse laying in the street, ignored, near his apartment, and later a deranged war veteran intent on murder pursuing him through the woods. But, for the most part, it is all about his mother. While the movie plays with stereotypes about overbearing Jewish mothers, Beau’s issues with his mother goes well beyond that and deep into creepiness – enough to make you wonder about the writer of this script.
Still, it is hard to overemphasize the impressive cinematic and visual artistry (from director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski) in this film, despite the squirm-inducing events taking place. One particularly impressive example of the visual artistry comes midway through the film, in a fantasy sequence that provides the audience (and the character) with a welcome break from Beau’s trials in the film. An escape into the woods leads to a magical fantasy sequence, in which Beau meets a traveling theater troupe and while watching their play, becomes a different character on a very different life journey, putting Joaquin Phoenix in a partly-animated and color-drenched landscape. This beautiful, creative fantasy sequence provides a respite from the terror of the Beau’s experiences and a relaxing breather for the audience, as well as the film’s highlight. After this delightful interlude, however, we come back to Beau’s nightmare journey.
Whether what is happening in this whole film is only in Beau’s imagination, whether it is all a nightmarish fever dream, the result of his new medication, a hallucination of a mentally ill mind, or some combination of those things, is never made clear in this crazy film. One has to admire the film’s artistry and the director’s skill and that of the actors but this film is an unsettling experience.
Casting Joaquin Phoenix for this role is the perfect choice, and in fact, the whole cast is impressive as well. Phoenix gives the kind of tour-de-force performance he is famous for, in this case, not as a villain but as a victim. Whether he is a victim of his own weakness, a mentally ill mind, a domineering mother, a series of unfortunate events or just evil afoot in the world, is not clear, but it sure falls hard on the unprepared Beau. Patti LuPone gives a powerful performance as Beau’s mother, a strong personality who has a host of her own issues, and represents some classic bad parenting. Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan play a weird couple who are obsessed with their son who was killed in the military yet ignore their angry teen-aged daughter.
At nearly 3 hours, BEAU IS AFRAID has all the earmarks of being yet another of those films that incubated during the Covid lock-down, joining a line of inward-gazing, and often long, films by major directors that were released last year and this. Among those are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s visually lush BARDO: FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTH. BEAU IS AFRAID has several things in common with the rambling, surreal BARDO, but where that film is an imagined biography, here the major tone is terror.
BEAU IS AFRAID is impressive as cinematic art and a nightmarish psychological horror film that fits in well with director Ari Aster’s previous works HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR and features a perfectly-cast Joaquin Phoenix, but it is an intense experience that is not for every audience and one that is even more disturbing than the previous two. Frustratingly, nothing is really resolved in this story, although we do get the answers to a few questions, and little is really revealed about Beau’s or his mother’s inner life or motivations.
BEAU IS AFRAID opens Friday, Apr. 21, in theaters.
