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Tag: Steve Carell

  • ‘Beautiful Boy’ review — Timothée Chalamet shines in this faulty addiction drama

    ‘Beautiful Boy’ review — Timothée Chalamet shines in this faulty addiction drama

    Beautiful Boy has a story worth telling, but the way it’s told doesn’t do justice to its subjects as it avoids the real pain of addiction.

    30-second review: Beautiful Boy has an incredible true story worth telling at its center, but the way director Felix Van Groeningen presents that story zaps any impact that it could have by opting for style over substance. It’s a classic case of telling instead of showing. The movie tells us that addiction takes a toll on both the addict and their loved ones and that it’s a cycle, but it doesn’t show us that. Instead, it focuses on fleeting emotional moments.

    Timothée Chalamet is terrific as Nic, the drug-addict son at the center of the story. The movie works best when it focuses in on him and his journey. But, the movie regularly flinches before it gets to the hard truths. That’s the biggest disservice it does to the story.

    Where to watch Beautiful Boy: Streaming on Prime Video.

    ★★

    From its opening moments, it’s clear that Beautiful Boy is going to be one of those tearjerker overwrought emotional dramas. Whether it’s a successful one could take time to parse out—yes, there are successful ones. However, it’s apparent from the cold open, frequent time jumping, and aggressive music cues that Beautiful Boy is going to be a trying experience.

    That’s not to say the true story of father and son pair David (Steve Carell) and Nic Sheff (Timothée Chalamet) working through the latter’s addiction isn’t worth telling. However, director Felix Van Groeningen‘s interpretation of the material strips out the actual emotion from the story and replaces it with something that feels artificial and cold. Emotional moments are often dictated in the movie, not earned.

    The issue is that it seems the entire movie is made up of “emotional moments” as Nic bounces from rehab to hospitals to the streets as David seems to be chasing him around trying to force him to get better, something that just pushes Nic further away from his grasp. Along the way, Nic’s stepmother Karen (Maura Tierney) and mother Vicki (Amy Ryan) are also there to support both men in the journey, but this is truly a father and son story. 

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    Beautiful boy
    Maura Tierney as Karen Barbour and Steve Carell as David Scheff star in BEAUTIFUL BOY

    Beautiful Boy has its moments and Groeningen deserves credit for those. A highlight comes nearly midway through the movie when David waits for Nic at a diner to confront him after his latest relapse. It’s a gorgeous dance between two great actors, particularly Chalamet whose balance of desperation from the high and frustration with his enabling father feels realistic and spot-on.

    In another moment, after Nic and his addict girlfriend Lauren (Kaitlyn Dever) break into David and Karen’s home to get money to support their habit. However, David and Karen return home and catch them as they drive off. Karen hops in the family’s minivan and gives pursuit. As she drives, though, Karen is quickly flooded with emotion at the lost “beautiful boy” she’s chasing. Tierney is great here. But moments like these are sparse in the movie.

    When Groeningen allows the actors to take the material and the characters and run with it with their incredible instincts Beautiful Boy works. However, he’s often too heavy-handed.

    The same goes for the erratic editing style which distracts from the narrative. There’s an argument to say that it helps communicate the feeling of addiction both on the person and their family. Particularly the repetitiveness of addiction—addiction, sobriety, relapse, addiction, sobriety, relapse. But the style also brings out another feeling: avoidance. 

    Beautiful Boy
    Timothée Chalamet as Nic Sheff and Steve Carell as David Scheff star in BEAUTIFUL BOY

    It feels like the characters and the story are an arm’s length away. The majority of the movie is told in breezy music montages—the number of needle drops is confounding—that doesn’t give you a chance to actually get to know the characters and make grasping the narrative even harder.

    Beautiful Boy has a great story and tackles a part of addiction that movies often miss—how the people we love do more harm than good when they’re trying to help. There’s been some criticism around the portrayal of meth addiction here, specifically, that I don’t have the insight into, but that being said Chalamet does great work. Carell, on the other hand, feels miscast.

    Addiction dramas need to be unflinching and Groeningen, to be frank, flinches. The movie looks beautiful, but addiction isn’t beautiful. It was almost as if he was afraid of the truth of it all. I’d love to have seen this story tackled by another director. 

    Beautiful Boy is now streaming on Prime Video.

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    More movies, less problems

    Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter and Letterboxd. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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  • 'Vice' is an angry movie that isn’t sure what it’s angry about — movie review

    'Vice' is an angry movie that isn’t sure what it’s angry about — movie review

    Vice follows Dick Cheney’s precipitous rise to power and his everlasting effect on American politics

    Quick review: Vice tries to grapple with the second Bush’s years in office through Dick Cheney but ends up with nothing to show for its efforts.

    Vice ends with Dick Cheney (Christian Bale under a heavy amount of makeup) turning to the camera and saying, “You chose me. And I did what you asked.” Then the movie’s end credits are played over “America” from West Side Story. It’s an infuriating end to a movie that had its issues but wasn’t completely a miss until it let on that it had no idea what it was trying to say.

    Sit through the end credits. Then witness the movie’s full-hearted reprehensible attempt at a BlacKkKlansman style “but this is happening today” coda that is meant to tie the movie together.

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    Never in cinematic history has a movie so stunningly tear itself apart in less than 30 seconds — the final 30 seconds, no less.

    Dick Cheney changed the world when he came to power in the second Bush administration as the Vice President. Our current terrifying political environment didn’t start in 2016. It’s been this way for nearly two decades.

    After a surprisingly typical biopic opening act that follows Cheney from his short time at Yale that ended with him dropping out to his stint blue collar worker that gets too drunk after his shift to an intern for Don Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) to the White House Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense under Bush senior to the Vice President to George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell following up his Oscar win for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri).

    What all these experiences have in common is that Cheney, driven by his Lady Macbeth-like wife Lynne (standout Amy Adams), is that he fails up. The section isn’t incredibly inspired.

    Vice
    Amy Adams (left) as Lynne Cheney and Christian Bale (right) as Dick Cheney in Adam McKay’s VICE, an Annapurna Pictures release. Credit : Matt Kennedy / Annapurna Pictures 2018 © Annapurna Pictures, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

    The whole story is framed by a mysterious narrator (Jesse Plemons, who was a scene-stealer in Game Night earlier this year) who talks straight to the camera and has all the bells and whistles director Adam McKay used in his Oscar-winning The Big Short — hyperactive visual cut-ins, breaking the fourth wall, quick montages through history. It is a satire after all.

    But about 40 minutes in, Vice makes a clear pivot to make Dick Cheney the clear villain of the story. But shouldn’t he always have been? Even after this pivot, though, the movie doesn’t always make clear its point-of-view. It tells us a lot about the Bush/Cheney years — the Florida recount, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq — but doesn’t give us any material or insights to grapple with what happened. Instead, it satirizes those actions.

    The story of Dick Cheney is a hard one to make funny because the implications of his story are dead serious — something the movie tries to say in the final minutes. It doesn’t help either that Cheney becomes completely opaque in the second half. We never know why he’s doing anything. Neither does McKay.

    “You chose me. And I did what you asked.” Adam McKay’s version of “you reap what you sow.” Even though Vice attempts to villainize Cheney, its final beats blame us — the citizens of this country. Not the system that puts men like Cheney in power. It blames us. But we didn’t choose you to tell this story, McKay. This isn’t what we asked for.