Review of Beautiful Boy (2011) by Marco P — 24 Sep 2011

Rarely are there performances that can evoke a strong reaction from me; this movie delivered on that in a huge way. It's hard to imagine being in the shoes of a parent whose only child is killed in a school shooting, but even more of a nightmare is being the parent of the shooter. This movie follows the aftermath of a couple living that nightmare, both juggling the loss of their son, seeking answers to the senseless violence, and the future of their marriage. Bravo to Maria Bello, and here's looking at Michael Sheen for a very promising Oscar nod this year.

I loved Roger Ebert's review of the film Elephant, which re-created the Columbine massacre. In it, he claims that the violence of that day has no real answers, that death is poker-faced and without pomp or circumstance. Yet in Beautiful Boy, the parents of the shooter are faced with the daunting task of finding those answers, and it seems that the more they discuss and put it through the grinder, the farther away they are from understanding.

Being in a troubled marriage at the beginning of the film, the couple are slammed against each other in the wake of the tragedy, asking "Did we do something, did we not do something?" Toward the end of the film we do not understand the boy's motives for the killings, but we begin to understand who the couple are: she smothered the boy to a fault while he was distant. Yet they have no one to turn to for comfort, not even close family. In spite of the fragile relationship they had prior, they realize they only have each other.

This was the beauty of this film for me, what touched me to the core and what drove me to write this review: nothing brings people closer together than shared experience.