For all those celebrating Mother’s Day this weekend, I recently caught up with two pictures currently in theaters that would offer an interesting double feature for the occasion … provided you have an ambivalent relationship with that poor woman who went through labor for you, who scrimped and saved every penny for you to go to a big fancy school, who was always there with a smile and a kind word and, by the way, why don’t you ever write or even call, by the way, Mr./Ms. Big Shot?
I read everywhere how Beau Is Afraid is extremely polarizing. For the life of me, I can’t understand why. I think these ostensibly polarized folks should read a newspaper every once in a while. The earth is dying, the political parties routinely demonize the other, fascism is the new black and society appears on the cusp of AI either revolutionizing life or destroying it as we know it. And in the midst of this tumult, I’m supposed to pick a side over Ari Aster’s big-budget indulgence?
Even in the realm of controversial films, from Last Tango in Paris to The Passion of the Christ, this tale of a depressed schlub and his oppressive mother seems awfully benign to be the subject of such teeth-gnashing. While Aster’s latest work is nowhere close to the horror mastery of his Hereditary and Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid is too interesting to warrant dismissal.
Joaquin Phoenix, our most daring of actors, is the fearful and guilt-ridden Beau Wasserman, who is preparing to fly home to visit the overbearing single mother who raised him. Mother and son have a strained relationship, we soon learn, since the film opens — in a deceptively conventional scene, by the way — with Beau talking to his psychiatrist. A series of absurdly unfortunate circumstances forces Beau to miss his flight. When searching for another way home, he learns with horror that his mother has died in a freak accident.
The subsequent trek home becomes an odyssey, or ordeal, for Beau to attend her funeral. Whether any of what unfolds onscreen is real or the product of our protagonist’s wounded mind is open for interpretation. What’s indisputable is that Beau Is Afraid is surreal, often cruelly funny, and eager to mess with its audience.
That approach works well enough for about half of its three-hour running time, depending on your predilection for this kind of material (think Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York or, more aptly, I’m Thinking of Ending Things). Beau winds up at the home of a middle-aged couple grieving the loss of their soldier son, who died in combat in Venezuela (yes, Venezuela). Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan are the delightfully weird parents, with Kylie Rogers their equal as the volatile daughter who sees Beau’s intrusion as an attempt to steal away her parents.
Things go off the proverbial rails after Beau’s adventure takes him to a theater troupe living deep in the forest. While that sequence is Aster at his most poignant and dreamlike (there’s even some animation thrown in, for good measure), Beau Is Afraid grows increasingly shrill and excruciating. Let’s just say Aster does Patti LuPone no favors casting her as arguably cinema’s most emasculating matriarch since Norman Bates’ mama.
Twisted notions of motherhood, albeit of a different sort, are also at the center of Evil Dead Rise, the fifth installment in the franchise that Sam Raimi kicked off in 1981 with the micro-budget horror masterpiece, The Evil Dead. We are a far cry from the fabled “shaky cam” that Raimi employed – two guys running as they clutched a long piece of plywood, on top of which was strapped a rolling camera – to capture the POV of malevolent spirits barreling through the woods. This Evil Dead offering, slick to a fault, starts off with a sly nod to its own upgraded professionalism. What we initially think might be the shaky cam turns out to be the vantage point of a drone operated by a soon-to-be victim.
In this iteration, the requisite turn of events that summon evil spirits leads us to the family of Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a frazzled single mom raising two teenagers (Gabrielle Echols and Morgan Davies) and their younger sister (Nell Fisher). When an earthquake splits open the ground outside their dingy Los Angeles apartment building, Ellie’s brood stumbles across a long-forgotten room that houses that pesky Book of the Dead. And because Ellie’s kids are not what you would call smart, it doesn’t take long for someone to do what they shouldn’t and let that book unleash its demonic shit show.
The script by writer-director Lee Cronin includes some gibberish about maternal instincts, as good mom Ellie transforms into a literal monster while the heroics are reluctantly left to her pregnant sister, Beth (Lily Sullivan), a band roadie who has come by for an unexpected visit. Cronin is much more inspired delivering on rollicking grotesqueries. He doesn’t shortchange gore hounds. We have chainsaws, knives, guns, an elevator flooded with blood, copious amounts of vomit – even a particularly nasty cheese grater.
But that’s all we have. Closer in spirit to Fede Alvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead reboot than the Raimi-directed original and two sequels (Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness), Evil Dead Rise, for all its high-octane gore, isn’t particularly scary, and none of it reveals even a scintilla of the humor and wit that made this franchise so irresistible in the first place.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 