Beautiful Boy (2018)

Film: Beautiful Boy (2018)
Stars: Steve Carell, Timothee Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan
Director: Felix van Groeningen
Oscar History: Chalamet made it with SAG and the Globes, but was the odd man out for the Oscars.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I remember the first time I saw Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie after Titanic, and for the briefest of moments, I was suddenly transported to a different world, for one second suddenly thinking that I was in the same cloud of Jack Dawson & that truly stupendous movie, arguably the most profound cinematic moment of my young adult life.  It took me years to accept another movie that I loved Leo in even close as much, and eventually had to sort of remind myself that movies like Titanic only come across once in an actor's career (if at all).  He's still one of my favorite onscreen performers, though, and I couldn't stop thinking about Leo when I caught Beautiful Boy recently, as it was a bit of deja vu for me as I watched Timothee Chalamet on the big-screen for the first time since Call Me By Your Name.

(Spoilers Ahead) For you see, Chalamet, in many ways, is the rare onscreen performance that has captured me as completely as Leo did so many years ago.  I've loved few other performances since then (there are some, of course, but they are sparse on the big screen), but Chalamet's Elio and that film in general took my breath away in a manner I wasn't sure was still possible (it's rare that I go into a film confident I'd love it, and still vastly underestimated how much I'd still end up adoring the picture).  But Chalamet, a talented performer who was also terrific in Lady Bird (a film that would have won Best Picture for me last year if CMBYN hadn't shown up), now has the impossible task with many moviegoers, but narcissisticly I'm focused on myself, to prove that not only he can play other roles, but that he can exist in a plane that isn't just Elio, but in fact (like DiCaprio before him) he's worth the price of admission for another movie.

Chalamet is incredible in Beautiful Boy, a wonderful high-wire act of nerves, body language, and destructive behavior, but this is decidedly not Call Me By Your Name, and after a few minutes of trying to mentally realize that, I settled into a pretty mundane story about addiction.  Chalamet is the only reason to see this movie, and it's not one that you go to hoping for relief; this is a slog, a boring one that touches on addiction plot points you know by heart.  It's callous to say about a true story (it's based on twin memoirs by David Sheff and his son Nic, played in the films by Steve Carell & Chalamet, respectively), but there's nothing new here, and only Chalamet's strong work in the lead makes it anything other than an asterisk for awards season.  Carell, for example, has been playing this role for years now.  Once noted for his work in comedy, he's made a mark for himself as a serious, dramatic leading man, but honestly (unpopular opinion time), he's never shown in his filmic career the same sort of introspective spark he exhibited as Michael Scott in The Office.  He's serviceable here, but there's so much to David that we leave the film not knowing, and Carell offers us nothing extra.  What, for example, is his relationship like with his other children, those with Maura Tierney (who is also very good, I want to say, even if the screenplay wants nothing to do with the fascinating layers she's bringing to this role)?  Why doesn't the film explore the competitive, frequently "bad parenting" relationship he has with ex-wife Amy Ryan?  David could be really interesting, but neither the writers nor Carell care about him when he isn't attached to Nic's descent.

Perhaps most damning of all, the film doesn't seem to realize that Carell's David a lousy dad, and has been most of his life, treating his son like a buddy after the divorce more than anything else.  There is a belabored string of scenes toward the end of the movie where David has to cut off ties with Nic, and the film acts like this is some form of heroism, but it never admits that David's relationship with Nic totally enabled his drug abuse in the first place.  That may sound callous, but this is a disjointed affair, one that (were it not a true story) would have surely ended with the Nic character dying (it makes more sense in terms of a narrative).  I frequently state that real life is a terrible place to find movie ideas, and Beautiful Boy is a perfect example of a film that needs to cater to its actual counterparts' egos and sense of importance, and in the process we lose the picture.  Chalamet will have other chances to help me realize him as something other than Elio, but it'd be a lot easier to move on if he chose a movie where he wasn't the only reason to buy the ticket.