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Beautiful Boy

A languid study in the banality of addiction as it especially affects loved ones.

Beautiful Boy

Grade: B

Director: Felix van Groeningen (Belgica)

Screenplay: Van Groeningen, Luke Davies (Lion), based on memoirs by David and Nic Sheff

Cast: Steve Carell (Foxcatcher), Timothee Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name)

Rating: R

Runtime:  2 hr

By: John DeSando

“My son is out there somewhere, and I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know how to help him!” David Sheff (Steve Carell)

And the answer is “You can’t.” Beautiful Boy biopic is the most depressing film in recent memory because a father, David, cannot pull his son, Nic (Timothee Chalamet), from the depths of addiction no matter how much love and money he expends. The descent has been chronicled in real life by journalist Dave in the titular bio and Nic in his, called Tweak.

The adapted screenplay, directed by Felix van Groeningen and written by him and others, is a sometimes-languid docudrama whose pervasive motif is the frustration of rehabbing one you love who does not want to be rehabbed. The film seems a recurring cycle of addiction, intervention, and re-addiction played out by the charming but aloof Chalamet and the tense, monotone Carell.

Except for two scenes of nearly deadly overdosing, the film has no riveting actions, just the semi-dramatic ones featured in the trailer. Otherwise. The audience can catch its breath in the journalist’s breathtaking vacation home somewhere in the woods outside San Francisco or Nic’s mom’s (Amy Ryan) digs in LA. We aren’t privy to how they could afford such upper-middle class luxury on Dad's journalist salary, or for that matter how Nic can leave them so often and support himself?

Could Dad be sending him money despite Dad’s growing awareness that son is using it to support his crystal meth addiction and more? No answer. The source books confirm Nic prostituted himself, but the film does not address the issue.

Therein lies one of the several challenges unmet: What is the source of the addiction, given all the flashbacks that don’t seem to answer the question?  Maybe that’s the point—reasons are inscrutable while we are left with the victim’s confession that the highs feel good:

“I felt better than I ever had, so . . .I just kept on doing it.”

Eventually, David realizes that until Nic wants to save himself, Dad will be powerless. There’s a good lesson here that do gooder’s may need to move on as the addicts relentlessly push their agenda. Even Christ has moments where he dusts off his sandals and moves on from the Pharisees and other malicious enemies without lingering to try to reform them.

He’s God, after all, who will not interfere with the free will He gave to mankind. “Sometimes,” as Steve McQueen intones in The Magnificent Seven, “you have to turn mother’s picture to the wall and get out of town.” Beautiful Boy is about moving on because the reality of addiction is banal and intractable for even the most impassioned parent.

John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.