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Byron Shire
March 28, 2024

Cinema Review: Beautiful Boy

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A seasoned bard

Guy Kachel had an idyllic entry to the world of music. Born in Tamworth, he was raised on the banks of the Peel River. The landscape was a fertile ground for his imagination. Seeing this rustic world change, as Tamworth developed into an inland city and friends grew to sometimes troubled adulthoods, provided insights for the artistry that later powered his career as a performer.

Is drug addiction a disease? Or are some people simply incapable of dealing with day-to-day reality? Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen refrains from making any judgment as he enters a psychological and emotional landscape similar to that of his stunning The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012). In this tender, morally complex movie, he chooses to focus equally on the damage done to the non-user, a father who can only watch helplessly as crystal meth takes hold of his adored son’s life. David Sheff (Steve Carell) has raised Nic (Timothée Hal Chalamet) in a loving household in which he has wanted for nothing. Like most teenagers, Nic turns on with pot and shares a joint with his dad, but soon graduates to the more ruinous ice – and without wanting to carp, apart from his hair getting messier, Nic never exhibits the physical ravages brought on by the drug. Beside himself with anxiety, David goes so far as to do a line of meth to gain an insight into what it is doing to his beautiful boy. Nic’s behaviour becomes erratic and deceitful, and his reaction to a girl’s overdose reveals a cold detachment that is horribly typical of the junkie. The slow realisation by David that he is fighting a losing battle builds on the heavy portent that prevails throughout and if the story’s numerous time-jumps are sometimes confusing, they do add to the sense of disruption and disorder that David is hoping to counter. Always good as ‘everyman’, Carell perfectly portrays a man on the edge of quiet despair – ‘What’s wrong with reality?’ he asks in frustration – while Chalamet’s Nic is both needy and resentful. The film’s title is from the song by John Lennon that David sings to his son, which also contains the fatalistic line of ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’. The soundtrack in general is profoundly influential, and includes an excerpt from Górecki’s maudlin Symphony No. 3 that gives to Nic more sympathy than some might think he deserves.


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