MOVIE REVIEW: Beautiful Boy

Nic Sheff seemingly had it all, then his life went up in a puff of smoke

David Sheff (Steve Carell) has to deal with his talented, ingenious and drug-addicted son Nic (Timothee Chalamet) in Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy.
David Sheff (Steve Carell) has to deal with his talented, ingenious and drug-addicted son Nic (Timothee Chalamet) in Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy.

The entire point of movie stars is to present an ideal version of what a human being can be, in looks, in charisma, in the nearly infinite possibilities that may await them, whatever their initial station and situation. We can see a certain amount of this same effect in some high-achieving young people, excelling in ways that seem to suggest a limitless future, even if we can be pretty certain, eventually time and circumstance will take a certain toll, bringing them painfully back down to earth.

In Felix van Groeningen's film, based on the dual memoirs from long-suffering father David Sheff (played here by Steve Carell), and drug-addict son, Nic (Timothee Chalamet), we are presented with a brutal conundrum: As a parent, how can you be expected to save your child if, as an addict, he routinely uses your nurturing instincts against you in the face of his disease?

Beautiful Boy

89 Cast: Steve Carell, Timothee Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Ryan, Timothy Hutton

Director: Felix van Groeningen

Rating: R, for drug content throughout, language, and brief sexual material

Running time: 2 hours

When we first meet Nic, he's a bright, good-looking kid with the kind of future that stretches in almost any direction: Charismatic and gifted, he's blessed with precisely the kinds of characteristics many of us would want for our children. His divorced father, a successful freelance journalist who has a frequent byline in Rolling Stone, has remarried a down-to-earth artist (Maura Tierney), living up in the woods outside of San Francisco, while his mother (Amy Ryan), also successful, lives down in L.A.

Smartly, the film doesn't try and suggest "reasons" for Nic's eventual dissent into habitual drug use -- his family life, though splintered between two parents, is solid and rewarding; his father and stepmother have two young children Nic adores; and both his parents live in beautiful houses in vibrant, exciting cities. He's exactly the kind of kid of whom you could say had a charmed life. And yet, as a teenager, Nic moves quickly from smoking weed to harder drugs, eventually landing on meth, which takes possession of his soul for the better part of a decade.

At first, David assumes, as many of us would, that it just takes love, and (secular) faith, and enough money to enroll Nic into high-rent treatment centers, but with each failure and relapse, with each lie Nic tells, or money he steals, or days/weeks he vanishes and isn't heard from until he has reached a point of crisis, David pulls a bit farther back, eventually realizing he is helpless to save his son from his own demons.

This decision does not come easily, but from years of frustration and regret and anguish that Nic can't seem to stop forcing his family to live through, as he stumbles through his life ever in pursuit of the perfect high. This is not a film of redemption, exactly, and the arc of Nic's life, with its tumultuous collapses and ascensions, does not offer any sort of facile feeling of uplift. Instead, van Groeningen, whose previous work includes the equally pitiless The Broken Circle Breakdown, keeps his focus tightly on the taut thread between father and son, and the way, eventually, that cord begins to fray and loosen over time.

In casting the luminous Chalamet in the role of Nic, the filmmakers give us exactly the type of celestial shooting star that captures our sense of loss when Nic's life devolves into living on the street, and scoring by any means necessary. Chalamet, whose previous oeuvre includes the transcendent Call Me By Your Name, is so stunningly captivating and talented, watching his character throw everything away in this manner is deeply affecting. Nic could have easily come off as precocious and smug, but Chalamet's performance suggests a deeper pool of misery and regret than at first meets the eye. Somehow he's able to convey Nic's essential goodness even as we see him perform outrageously terrible and selfish acts -- stealing his little brother's savings, in one particularly horrific scene -- or relentlessly falling off the wagon over and over again.

And yet, because Nic continues to raise our hopes and dash them against the jagged rocks; like his father, we begin to resent his presence. He vanishes for stretches of the film only to reappear, a girlfriend (Kaitlyn Dever) in tow whom he also turned into a junkie, to lie and steal and tear the family down again, until we can understand David's eventual decision to turn away and let Nic figure it out for himself.

Steve Carell made his career as a comic loon -- as the thoroughly befuddled Brick Tamland in Anchorman; the maddeningly self-absorbed Michael Scott in The Office; or the titular 40-Year-Old Virgin, but in recent years he has stretched out into more dramatic roles. His role as the demented John du Pont in Foxcatcher was eye-opening, as was his work playing the deeply depressed 'Doc' in Richard Linklater's Last Flag Flying. But as one critic suggested, when he plays in straight dramas, he buries any hint of winsomeness in a crypt. His work here is strong, but unlike Chalamet, who is able to simultaneously portray contradictory elements at once, Carell is more grimly determined to play David with a serious limitation of notes.

You could say this choice dampens the film's dramatic trajectory, but van Groeningen isn't interested in such simplified arcs in the first place. Other than Nic's occasional bouts of vivaciousness, the closest the film comes to wry, is with the director's a bit on-the-nose music cues (the most blatant of which involves a certain famous ditty from Fiddler on the Roof).

There's nothing wrong with a serious drama, of course, especially a true story that concerns a rising scourge in this country, but without much sense of conviviality, it takes on a sort of unrelenting tone that doesn't gibe with the tumultuous journey of our protagonist. Even with Chalamet's brilliance, the film grows muted by its own depressing miasma.

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Little sister Daisy (Oakley Bull) and stepmother Karen (Maura Tierney) suffer collateral damage when Nic (Timothee Chalamet) spins out of control in the family drama Beautiful Boy.

MovieStyle on 11/09/2018

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