"My Son Is Out There Somewhere, And I Don't Know What He's Doing! I Don't Know How To Help Him..."
Following on the early year release of the quite baffling Robert Zemeckis directed Welcome to Marwen, Steve Carell (The Big Short) returns once again to the big screen with Beautiful Boy, a low-key and rather delicate insight into the troubled family life of American journalist and author, David Sheff, whose 2008 memoir of the same name acts as the basis for a movie focusing on the central relationship between Carell's Sheff and his young, overly troubled and drug addicted son as played by the breakout star of the past few years, Timothée Chalamet (Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name). Directed by Belgian filmmaker, Felix Van Groeningen, who also contributes to the screenplay alongside Lion screenwriter, Luke Davies, Beautiful Boy is a particularly somber cinematic glance into the effect of substance abuse and addiction, a film which although struggles to maintain a constant flow of greatness throughout its near two hour runtime due to some rather messy and dragged out pacing, succeeds in presenting a wide range of themes and ideas with a level of dramatic authenticity which makes the final product something both emotionally draining and cinematically fulfilling, and with a central acting duo with talent and chemistry to burn, Beautiful Boy is annoyingly just short of something rather excellent, but still highly impressive nonetheless.
Bouncing back and forth throughout the early life of Chalamet's Nick across three main time periods, Beautiful Boy takes the nonlinear narrative approach in attempting to portray a boundless familial bond between father and son, with Carell's David a well educated, respected and grounded caring family man who is completely bedazzled by a fundamental lack of understanding regarding his son's reliance on a horrifying range of illegal substances when the world has seemingly been handed to him on a plate. Will Carell and Chalamet joyously bouncing off of each other with a level of acting which just breathes authenticity and has no problem whatsoever in attempting to construct a sense of realism, the differences in performance type also benefits the film as a whole, with Chalamet's drug-fuelled transformation carrying the almighty stand-out heft seen before from other actors in the likes of films with tonal similarities such as Requiem for a Dream and Dallas Buyers Club, and Carell counteracting the extreme side of things with a nuanced, empathetic and quite understated performance which ranks up there with his best dramatic work since Foxcatcher. With an ocean-like cinematography, a really interesting soundtrack which blends indie guitar riffs with a jukebox soundtrack, allowing for one of the best scenes in which a teenage Nick bellows out "Territorial Pissings" alongside the radio, Beautiful Boy is indeed a really interesting two-sided character piece, which although does let itself down with a rather silly elongated runtime, works best in the dramatic sense by having that horrific sense of unease the most impressive works about substance abuse always need to include in order to really stick and make a lasting impression.
