Beautiful Boy (Felix van Groeningen)

[Peng]

[Peng]

Mild yay. Timothee Chalamet proves his breakthrough is no fluke, giving another achingly physical performance that is slightly undercut by him looking too clean most of the time, no matter what phase of addiction he is in (the insistent music/song montages also don’t help). Steve Carell is quite solid when he doesn’t have to belt out long, angry, gratingly monotonous shouts, which unfortunately happens a lot. The jumbled-up chronology is at once distracting and refreshing -- just too much and too gracelessly rhymed at many moments, but it also helps avoid standard rise-fall-rise of drug narrative, depicting addiction as a seemingly never-ending, timeless vortex of tediously horrible routines, catching users and loved ones alike in its grip. Asides from the PSA end credit cards, I like the muted ending the film arrives at too, which feels like a hauntingly resigned stop point in a cycle rather than a definitive end. 6.5/10

[Wryan]

Saw this. It's got a very Lifetime feel and look that it can't quite shake. And I wasn't put off by the editing flashbacks (which is really all they were, as the main thrust of the narrative is quite linear) as some were, but I did think the editing occasionally did a disservice to the actors, creating some moments that were jarring more for their execution (bad) than their impact (good). I really enjoyed the song choices throughout, tho they do sometimes intrude. Maura Tierney and Amy Ryan are too good, and too good in this, to have such little time to work with. Chalamet is mostly very good, tho he makes some decidedly "young actor" choices here and there--or perhaps it was nudging or editing selections from the director, unsure. When it works, it's a very effective portrayal of the painful Sisyphian rise and fall of rehab and relapse and what it does to bonds and people. When it doesn't, it feels slight or just off the bull's eye.

[Grouchy]

I guess "I was bored" is as honest an assessment as I can provide. There's nothing wrong with it as far as writing and performaces go, and I agree with Wryan that the non-chronological editing isn't complex enough to be a distraction, but it's difficult to get me to scroll Instagram like a millenial during a movie and this one managed that feat.

Between this and Foxcatcher​, Carell is becoming the king of dramatic turns in unengaging films.