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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Dallas IFF Review: Beautiful Boy

Note: This review originally ran during Dallas International Film Festival. I’m re-running it now because Beautiful Boy opens in limited release today.

Day Two at Dallas IFF got off to a slower start than I intended, as I ended up spending the afternoon on the phone and buried in my computer working. I worked straight through lunch and dinner, finally emerging from my hotel room in time to make it over to the Angelika for the Centerpiece screening of Beautiful Boy, which premiered at Toronto last year and is being released by Anchor Bay in NY and LA sometime soon.

Beautiful Boy is about a couple whose marriage is ending after years of withering on the vine, and what happens when their 18-year-old son goes on a shooting spree on his college campus, killing 21 people and himself.

Let me say first that I think this is an excellent and original idea to explore in a film; when a tragedy like this happens, of course our focus is on the victims whose lives are ended by the shooter. But the idea of exploring what it feels like to be the parents of the shooter, who’ve lost and are mourning their child as well but are also dealing with the phenomenal, mind-boggling grief that must affect someone whose child has done something so terrible that’s hurt so many people? That’s a compelling thing to explore.

Even so, I avoided seeing this film in Toronto because, as a mom of seven kids (five of my own, and two fine stepsons), I just wasn’t sure I could handle the subject matter. As a mother, how often have I sang my babies to sleep, stroked their fine hair, kissed their sweet cheeks, prayed no harm would ever come to them? And when I’ve seen news reports of school shootings and such, certainly I’ve thought, as I expect many parents do, about what it must feel like to be the parent of the person who goes off the deep end like that.

To live with knowing that the child you bore and raised grew up to hurt another human being would be, for me, one of the worst things I could imagine; how could you live with the guilt of feeling that you must have, as a parent, done something that caused your child to do such a horrible thing? I don’t know that I could. So I expected Beautiful Boy would leave me gut-wrenched and sobbing as it pushed all those buttons that I know are already there inside me, playing on every maternal fear I’ve ever harbored.

But … while there are a pair of fine performances by Maria Bello and Michael Sheen as the parents here, and the film does deal effectively enough with the logistical issues of the aftermath of the shooting — the news crews hounding the parents; the estranged couple pulling together, apart, together, apart, as they struggle to understand how their son could do this; the family members and friends not sure how to react and respond; the inability to properly mourn the loss of their own son because of the churning guilt over the lives he took with him — for me, the emotional impact the film should have had didn’t quite hit the mark.

It felt like a deliberate choice on the part of writer-director Shawn Ku and his co-writer Michael Armbruster to deal with their topic almost from an observatory distance, rather than from what it might feel like to be the person this is actually happening to, and there’s some use of shooting technique (hyperactive, roving, handheld pans, extreme close-ups) that felt like a deliberate attempt to convey emotional chaos through the use of technology rather than through authentically exploring the emotional anguish of being in this situation. There’s also a secondary story that doesn’t really need to be in there.

This isn’t to say that Beautiful Boy is a bad film. In many respects it’s a good film, and very likely it will connect emotionally with other people better than it did with me. But overall, I couldn’t help but feel that this script needed a mother co-writing it to lend it the weight of authentic emotion. I feel more emotional thinking about the idea of the film than I did while actually watching it.

You may have a completely different emotional response to it, though. And I do have to applaud Ku for tackling such a challenging topic with his first feature and scoring such talented actors for the leads. It’s still a hell of a lot better a first-time film than many, many filmmakers make, and I give him all due credit for that.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon