Review of Beautiful Boy (2018) by Marcelo A — 08 Dec 2018

Perhaps because he´s coming from a more solid career in comedy films and even out of gender bias, we rarely realize how good actor Steve Carell is. His recent choices, however, only serve to reinforce the talent of the "40 Year Old Virgin" (2005) as a dramatic actor. "Foxcatcher" (2014) and especially "The Big Short" (2015) already exhibited its versatility. And when he plunged into dramas like "Last Flag Flying" (2017) and the most recent "Beautiful Boy" (2018), Carell further justified the choices made by different directors for their work.

There are some similarities between these two more recent films. "Last Flag Flying" is the story of a father who loses his son in the Iraq war and only wants to bury him while he lives his mourning alongside fellow friends of the Vietnam War. "Beautiful Boy" is the story of a father, a family, but very focused on this father, who deals with his son's drug addiction. In both Carell's work is accurate, touching and with the safety of veteran experienced dramatic actors.

His David Sheff is one of the strengths of "Beautiful Boy". The other is the work of his colleague Timothee Chalamet. At just 23 years old, the actor has been consolidating himself as a strong name in cinema with ever better performances. Chalamet had already drawn attention in the drama "Call Me by Your Name" (2017), when it was the young Elio, who fell in love with an American writer, his first love. In "Beautiful Boy" he brings the necessary dramatic charge to Nic's story and does not fall into the exaggeration of the daydreams of madness by the use of drugs so frequent in films reporting this type of problem.

Nic's pain is absurdly palpable. Your desperation to get out of it too. Depression interspersed with moments of false joy, for it was known how much Nic suffered from within, are alive in Chalamet's eyes.

"Beautiful Boy" is a hard movie to watch. A real story about a family that had everything to be perfect and is dredged by the drug problem. Especially the use of methamphetamine. But at the same time it is of a unique beauty, or perhaps difficult to describe by showing this strength of the relationship between father and son. An almost unbreakable force even when David sees the need to leave the scene to recover. And how beautiful Carell's work is by carrying all these nuances with her.

And at this point it is necessary to speak of another fundamental question in the construction of this story: the edition of the film of Felix van Groeningen, the same director of "Alabama Monroe" (2012). The idea of ??building a fragmentary history with bits of past and present mixing together was risky, could cause confusion, but it was very well done. In her, we gradually understood that relationship of love between father and son, the way Nic immersed himself in drugs, moved away from his father, his mistakes, his comings and goings, the bottom of the pit. A structure that brought to the film moments of pure poetry.

"Beautiful Boy" speaks of a very serious subject, the chemical dependency, but without falling into false moralisms. On the other hand, it is also a movie about the force of love. The love of a father for his son, for a whole family for this son and for never giving up. Even when everything seems lost. And it still has an excellent soundtrack.