Two Ways to Spend Three Hours
Beau Is Afraid and The Plains
Watching
Beau Is Afraid (2023)
I want to just call this movie juvenile and be done with it but if I did so I’d feel the need to point to something more concrete than just vibes to back that claim up.1 When we meet the titular Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a pitiful husk of a man who lives by himself in a shabby one-bedroom, he seems to be making a sincere effort to work on himself. He meets with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) to talk about his longstanding anxieties, most of which stem from his relationship to his mother, whom Beau is preparing to visit for the anniversary of his father’s death. His therapist is pleased with Beau’s progress but writes him a new prescription anyway (“Take it with plenty of water”) before sending Beau on his merry way, back into a nameless city crawling with threats of violence around every corner.
The night before his scheduled flight to his mother’s Beau can’t sleep a wink; a neighbor keeps playing their music loud and someone keeps sliding angry notes under his door. He finally conks out after 3:30 and wakes up 12 hours later. In his panicked haste to get to the airport, he leaves his keys and luggage unattended in the hallway and 15 seconds later they’re gone. He takes one of his new meds and finds the water in his building isn’t working; fearing death from not taking them as prescribed, he runs across the street to buy a bottle of water, dodging grotesque NPCs who slink into his apartment in his absence. Beau calls his mother and learns from a UPS guy (Bill Hader…?) who comes to the phone that her head’s been done in by a chandelier. And so on and so forth. It’s a dreadful 45 minutes that’s finally cut off when Beau is hit by a car and taken in by the wealthy suburbanites who smashed into him.
Things slow down a bit once Beau is being babied by surgeon Roger (Nathan Lane) and wife Grace (Amy Ryan), who seem to be treating him as a surrogate son for the one they lost in the army. Their teenage daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers) torments everyone onscreen and off with shrill tantrums over Beau’s intrusion into her life (the ’rents put Beau up in her room; empty big brother’s room is sacrosanct). Also for some reason their son’s belligerent army friend Jeeves (Denis Ménochet) lives in a trailer in their backyard. Don’t worry about it! The absurdist chaos of the city streets is distilled into a more rarefied miasma of unease during Beau’s stay in the ’burbs. Everyone in this section of the film is shown to be fairly heavily medicated, with Jeeves requiring the most drastic measures (frequent sedation to calm his apoplexy).
The focus on mental illness and medication makes one wonder if the film is essentially unreliable, an attempt at depicting the worst projections of a severely anxious and traumatized man. Whatever helps you cope! The third and fourth acts of the film change moods once again, the third a dreamy and interminable odyssey enacted by a troupe of wandering players in the middle of the woods (this was my favorite part) and the fourth the most played-straight section, for the most part, set at Beau’s mother’s home the day of her funeral. Somewhere between these two acts it becomes clear that what we’re really watching is a giant shaggy dog story. It’s almost impressive, given how infrequently they throw money around to get those things made.
For all the time you spend with it, you receive neither any remarkable insight into the character of Beau and his mom-inflicted psychic wounds nor into much of anything else for that matter. But who needs a movie to be insightful? Isn’t it at least entertaining? When it isn’t confounding or downright punishing the viewer, Beau is frequently quite funny and the cast—which includes both Parker Posey and Patti LuPone when all is said and done—is pretty much up to the ridiculous task that’s been asked of them. Different movements of the film may hold up well for different viewers, but as a whole Beau is found lacking, even haphazard. Scenes seem to have been conceived in isolation and thrown together in this movie for lack of knowing what else to do with them. It’s less an immersive work in the sense that you want to get lost in its vision and more in the sense that, for reasons that are never really made clear, it feels like the filmmaker is trying to drown you.
The Plains (2022)
Around 90% of The Plains is shot from the backseat of a car as its driver, the middle-aged Andrew (Andrew Rakowski) drives home from his office job outside Melbourne. From day to day, Andrew follows a similar routine: listen to public radio on his way out of the office parking lot, sit in traffic, call his mother to check in on her, sit in traffic, call his wife, sit in traffic. Occasionally he’s joined by carpooling coworker David (David Easteal, the director), and over the course of the film their small talk evolves into more intimate conversations about each other’s lives. Per the title of this newsletter, all this goes on for three hours.
The central conceit of The Plains becomes clear pretty quickly, so it’s invigorating to watch it break from its basic formula. Peppered throughout the film are glimpses of the world outside Andrew’s Hyundai, mostly drone shots of the vast plains set apart from the urban sprawl. At the beginning of the film it isn’t even clear that there will be any cuts at all, so the first such edit—at about the 10 minute mark—is a thrilling micro-event in itself. Easteal also gets a lot of Kuleshovian mileage out of his editing juxtapositions. One cut, after a long and heartfelt conversation between Andrew and David, returns us to the same view of the empty car we see at the start of each driving sequence, only this time the emptiness of the front seat strikes us as downright mournful.
At face value, The Plains is a document of tedium and how people cope with it. We rarely watch Andrew sit in total silence, and when he’s with David the nonchalance in his voice betrays his desperate desire to fill the space with something. He asks David about his romantic life, complains about difficult colleagues, explains why he and his wife Cheri (Cheri LeCornu, who we briefly meet in one of the drone-shot interludes) chose not to have children, discusses his mother’s dementia, and eventually breaks out his iPad to share some of his photography with David. It’s a lot like those Iranian movies where people drive around talking to each other the whole time, except the camera is placed so as to put the viewer at a bit of a remove from the subjects.
That psychological distance serves to underscore the cartographic function of the film. We start to notice recurring features along the route: the under-construction building outside Andrew’s office, progressively closer to completion from scene to scene; the trees along the road; the highway overpasses and onramps, and so on. Since there are no temporal interruptions in any given scene from the time that Andrew gets into his car to the point, usually 10 to 20 minutes in, when Easteal decides to cut, each ride maps a bit of the geography of this corner of Australia. As a third “passenger” in the car, forced into a singular perspective that’s alien to the experience of actually riding as one (where you can at least turn your head around), the viewer seeks novel points of interest in the built and natural terrain that are visible through the windshield. The introduction of the drone footage, then, provides a point of reference against which to measure the scope of the urban sprawl we’ve been traversing by car and to contemplate how it all came to be.2
When Andrew isn’t listening to the radio, the monitor beside his dashboard displays the time. Knowing that I had strapped myself in for three hours of this, I couldn’t not look at the clock, to try to judge how much time had elapsed since the start of a shot but also, really, to triangulate how much time was left. Why did I feel guilty for doing so? No one owes a movie all the time it asks of them—as the meme has it, just walk out. You can leave!!! At one point I jokingly told myself that sticking with the film was an act of solidarity with commuters. But of course this is the whole point: by inserting himself into the film, Easteal is viscerally empathizing with (and alleviating) Andrew’s alienation at the same time that the formal rigor of his filmmaking supplies a fresh look at the environment that shapes it.
Programming Notes
Once again Movie Enthusiast is observing summer hours. I’ll have one newsletter between June and August, and I’ll resume my usual monthly schedule in September.
One last thing: I’ve created an index of movies I’ve written about since 2020 for your reference and perusal. You can get to it anytime from the navigation pane in this substack’s homepage.
If you feel like skipping to the second half of this newsletter: suicide by drinking paint. Next!
The ecological significance of commuting by car does not go unremarked upon either. In one shorter scene, Andrew listens to a radio report on climate change, which necessarily leads one to wonder about the forces that led to Andrew driving to work rather than taking a train.