Ari Aster, writer/director of Beau Is Afraid, at the film's premiere on April 10, at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
For Ari Aster, life is one big sick joke. Or, rather, it can be.
In his wonderfully disturbing new movie, Beau Is Afraid, the writer-director finds a deep and perverse kind of comedy in the misadventures of its title character, a psychologically and sexually stunted man who embarks on a surreal journey to attend his mother’s funeral. As played by Joaquin Phoenix, Beau is a walking, barely talking bundle of nerves and anxieties – a paranoiac whose fears are constantly confirmed as he encounters-slash-endures one pitch-black gag after another, from discovering his mother’s death during a phone call with a UPS driver to losing his virginity to the soundtrack of Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby.
The gallows humour isn’t new for Aster, at least for those audiences paying careful, skin-crawling attention. The 36-year-old director’s breakthrough film, 2018′s Hereditary, was a horror movie in structure and story, but wore a thin layer of caustic humour like a second skin. (Think of the instantly classic scene in which Toni Collette shrieks, “I am your mother!” at the dinner table while the family deals with demonic possession lurking in the background.) Aster’s much-memed follow-up, 2019′s Midsommar, was even more forward with its comedic intentions. When your film ends (spoiler for a four-year-old movie) with a bad boyfriend burned alive in the skin of a bear suit for his toxic-relationship sins, you just have to laugh, right?
Taking the Mel Brooks maxim of “tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die” to a new extreme, then, is Aster’s latest film. Unrelenting and juvenile, yet engineered with the sophisticated wit of a true student of cinematic history, Beau Is Afraid is a chortled gag of a movie. And its core sensibility – I’m laughing, but should I be? – easily bleeds into Aster’s real world.
Take the incident last week in which Phoenix, appearing before an audience in Los Angeles for a postfilm Q&A session, told the crowd that Aster was currently tripping on acid. Yeah, about that …
”That was Joaquin’s joke, I was just going with it!” Aster says with a nervous laugh during a publicity stop in Toronto this week. “He’s a very funny guy. I mean, I was definitely intimidated when I first met him, but as we got into the work, we developed a real rapport. We both discovered early on that we were very similar.”
Meaning, partly, that Aster and Phoenix can both easily find laughs amid the chaos.
”There’s a seriousness of purpose that is immediately very clear and very bracing,” Aster says. “But Joaquin approaches the work with a lightness that might surprise people.”
Joaquin Phoenix in a scene from Beau is Afraid.Photo Credit: Takashi Seida/A24 via AP
The lightness is visible through Beau Is Afraid’s many cracks of darkness. For instance: the vulgar graffiti that covers the lobby of Beau’s derelict apartment building – some of which was drawn by Aster himself – or the film’s many, barely visible in-jokes that seem inserted either for the most eagle-eyed of viewers or simply Aster himself. (Will anyone but the hardest core of Ray Liotta fans realize that Beau lives in a city named after the actor’s all-but-forgotten 1994 film Corrina, Corrina? Or that Beau’s plane ticket is for Air Liotta?)
”Part of the fun of constructing this evil funhouse mirror version of our world is getting lost in cataloguing all the background gags and details and signs and posters,” Aster says. “I had this Google doc that was pages and pages long with ideas for how to populate this world. There are probably hundreds or even thousands of items there, it was a joy to do.”
Less fun for Aster, perhaps, is bearing witness to the cultural discourse attempting to digest just what Beau Is Afraid is all about. Already, social-media users seem to be losing their minds – more easily than usual, at least – attempting to make sense of Aster’s film. (One already viral post from a moviegoer claimed to witness a man stand up in the theatre postcredits and yell, “I better not hear a single person clap!”)
”I think it’s wisest for me to not harp on it, especially because I’m just in the thick of it right now and it’s hard to see two inches from my nose,” the director says. “I always knew that the film would be divisive, but there are times when I’m shocked at just how divisive it’s proven to be. The film becomes increasingly alienating as it goes along, but I would almost be disappointed if there weren’t extreme reactions one way or the other.”
Another extreme reaction that audiences might have is attempting to decipher just what the real-life relationship might be between Aster and his own mother, given how intense the parent-child relationship is on-screen. (Beau’s mom is played by Zoe Lister-Jones in flashbacks and Patti LuPone in the present-day, with both actors delivering the most terrifying portrayals of an on-screen matriarch since Piper Laurie in Carrie. Or maybe the skeletal spectre of the mom that haunts Norman Bates in Psycho.) But, according to Aster, nope, everything is good on that end.
“Yeah, no, not really,” he says when asked if he discussed that aspect of his life with anyone on-set, including LuPone and Phoenix. “I have a really good relationship with my mother.”
Whether that is just another one of Ari Aster’s darkly funny jokes or not will be up to you to decide.
Beau Is Afraid is now playing in theatres.