Beautiful Boy (2018)
Review of Beautiful Boy (2018), directed by Felix van Groeningen
In the past couple of months, I’ve finally been catching up on all the hype movies that people were talking about years ago and were obsessed with.
I remember in 2019 when this came out before Timothee Chalamet blew up to the entirely new level he is at now with Dune and even being in a Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch), but I guess this was about the time when I started noticing all of the same people in Hollywood were being cast over and over again, then I vehemently decided to reject watching their movies and turned to foreign movies.
I don’t regret that decision at all, especially now as I see how this problem is getting even worse.
Anyways, Beautiful Boy was such hype when it first came out. I remember that and how people were thinking that Timothee was going to get nominated for Oscar for this one because it was clearly Oscar bait.
He didn’t get nominated, but some people I knew were raving about his performance. That’s what eventually got me to sit down and watch this years later because I was bored and I saw that it was free to watch on Amazon Prime.
Onwards with the review!
In Beautiful Boy, a college-aged son and his father grapple with the impacts of the son’s addiction to hard drugs.
This is a movie that starts immediately in media res. Our protagonist, David Sheff (played by Steve Carrell of The Office fame) has a son who has gone missing, causing David immediate stress in the search for what has exactly happened.
When his son is found, his worst fears have come true: there are signs of drug use on his son, who’s named Nick (played by Timothee Chalamet). This prompts David to check Nic into a rehab clinic, where it is revealed that Nic has been doing crystal meth. But at the rehab, once placed in a halfway house, goes missing again.
Once Nic is out of rehab, the storm seems to have passed. Nic, on the surface, seems to be clean and so David allows him to go away to college to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer.
Nic even gets a girlfriend (who I recognized immediately, she was in a Disney channel show awhile back), but then loses the ideal life he has created when he begins to use heroin. David, sensing the changes in his son due to the drugs when he comes back home to visit, tries to intervene but chaos unfolds.
The climax of this is the diner scene when Nic meets with his father to beg for money to go to New York City. It isn’t up until this point we clearly see the impacts of the drugs on Nic’s psyche because he has never been this aggressive on the screen and a lot of the major changes have been off-screen (e.g. him losing his girlfriend, probably dropping out of college, etc.).
This serves as a shock to the viewer because of how he explodes in this public space as his father refuses to give him money for the drugs.
And then we go over another hill: Nic gets clean when going to his mother in Los Angeles, but then, on a whim, takes a trip to San Francisco and falls back into drugs.
It’s here we see how his stepmother begs David to give up on Nic, he’s too far lost, representing this outside force that is putting pressure to give up on his son.
The final straw was when Nic and his new girlfriend return home to steal all the valuables in the family home to sell for drugs. And it is here David finally decides he’s had enough; he can’t keep coddling his son and thinking that it will just easily get better.
The narrative of this film tends to split between the father and the son and how they’re handling their lives and the situation, which makes sense considering the content this movie was based on; a father and a son, whom the characters in this movie represent, had written memoirs about the same conflict between them.
It also demonstrates that one’s addiction impacts the entire family, as Nic even steals from his younger brother’s piggy bank in order to fund his drugs. That was an entirely new level of low right there.
However, I found only the acting of Chalamet to be decent in this one. I wasn’t a fan of how Carrell played the father, I felt that it came across as a bit hollow on the screen.
There’s also another major qualm I have with this movie: it doesn’t capture my attention as a viewer well enough. Besides the drugs, this story seems to lack any sort of substance, which is why it revolves so heavily on Nic’s relapses to propel the plot forward. There are very few stakes and motives.
I get that it’s based on a memoir, but we have almost no characterization of the characters outside of the issue of addiction. Who are they really? We see that David is a New York Times writer but he actually doesn’t do anything involved with his career really in the film.
All we get are some domestic moments with his new wife and then the fight with his old one. Nic gets some characterization, as he loves poetry and wants to be a writer, but that identity is completely lost to the drugs and he just becomes, in a way, another faceless druggie with no personality.
Overall Thoughts
Unless you’re a really big fan of one of the actors, I would honestly recommend skipping Beautiful Boy. It’s a pretty basic movie when it comes to the visuals and actual components that make it a film; there wasn’t anything that impressed me visually or particularly stood out.
I think it was clear that this was meant to be a regular blockbuster film that’s meant to be slightly heartwarming because of the father-son duo but also slightly horrifying due to the cycle of addiction-recovery-relapsing.
It’s an important story, yes, because it humanizes the people who are addicted. But is it a good story for the screen? Probably not. It lacks dramatic action in a way that won’t keep the viewer from getting bored, and there’s nothing unique about how it was filmed or edited.
