Beautiful Boy

It can be hard to evaluate a film such as this. Its striking realism is both a gift and a curse: seeing its protagonists in their naturally empty and shell-shocked state for much of the film doesn't make for entertaining viewing - nonetheless its emotional scenes pack such a weighty punch, heightened by Sheen and Bello's terrific performances, you can truly feel their agony.

While the fallout from the unconscionable number of tragedies that inspired this film tends to focus mainly on the perpetrator, then on the victims and their families, "Beautiful Boy" wisely forces its audience to think about the side of the story that is rarely heard.

In this nearly terrifying age where our children are growing significantly faster than we want them to, fear, anxiety, and near paranoia starts to overtake the best of parents. In America, we have witnessed, in this generation alone, some of the most evil ever conducted by mankind in all of history; the fall of the twin towers, the war in Iraq, the shooting massacre in Virginia Tech, all terrible staples in my memory and I'm not even thirty yet. What other horrors will this lifetime bring? As a new father, I want to wrap my daughter Sophia in a bubble and never let her see the light of day for fear of what she may either endure or be influenced by. Shawn Ku's Beautiful Boy examines the aftermath of a young man, Sammy, that commits a mass shooting at his school and ultimately takes his own life. Bill (Michael Sheen) and Kate (Maria Bello) are your average married couple. Held back by grief, guilt, and rage, Bill and Kate undertake the scrutiny from the presses and the families as the sole reasons for young Sammy's demise. How could you move on from a nightmare you couldn't wake up from? Ku takes on the story with ferocity, examining a vast subject, which perks our ears up and raises our eyebrows. Ultimately Ku fails at getting down to the emotional center of this tale. The narrative picks up rather quickly from the beginning but loses pace and theme quickly. It's not necessarily a failure on Ku's part or co-writer Michael Armbruster, simply not as evolutionary in terms of independent filmmaking. The premise is enticing enough to withstand its flaws and it does have moments of brilliance, especially in the scenes following the shooting. However, it's the powerful performances of Michael Sheen and Maria Bello that hook the viewer in and safely guide throughout. Michael Sheen delivers his finest performance since his towering work in Stephen Frears' The Queen. Sheen attacks the character unlike anything seen from him before. He is engaged and delivers the emotional peril of a heartbroken father attempting to pick up the pieces in the most magnificent ways possible. Sheen invites the viewer into his world, showing the ugliest and worst parts about him, and letting us form our own opinion. Downright brilliant. Maria Bello, who I fell in love with in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, handles Kate with care, love, and ease. Bello's precision and dedication to the craft stands nearly on the top of most actresses today. It also equals one of her finest works in years. Her heart-on- the-sleeve approach not only allows us to respect Kate but it transforms her into a clear sign and example of masterclass acting. Where it can easily be taken over the top, Bello holds it right to the edge, never pushing us over. In a rare and personal plea, these two performances should well be on the Oscar radar. As a small and obviously personal film, Michael Sheen and Maria Bello deliver clear and cut, two of the most worthy performances of award's recognition this year. It's reminiscent of the same feeling Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams delivered in their powerful works in last year's Blue Valentine. In his briefest scenes, Kyle Gallner (Sammy) boils his performance to the rim and delivers a clever and daring performance. Beautiful Boy has raw and emotional power without falling all over itself with melodrama, but it does come up short in some narrative regards. But with these two talented actors in tow, the film will knock your socks right off in simple artistry.

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Beautiful Boy is not a fun movie to watch. Although arrestingly realistic, it can be a pretty painful ordeal to endure. In fact, it feels like such an immaculate representation of what it must be like to live through a horrific tragedy that one feels uneasy, restless, and depressed for hours afterward. So – know that going into the theater.

As the story begins, a college freshman named Sammy is calling his parents at home to check in. Mom Kate (Maria Bello) is a typical concerned parent, wanting her child to do well; Dad Bill (Michael Sheen) asks is Sam needs any money and is doing well, and he hangs up. The next morning, the terrible news: Sam has shot 18 students and teachers in his college before killing himself.

The movie wisely shows us nothing of the massacre; its focus is on the aftermath. Kate and Bill are staked out by the media. They escape to her brother's house to live with him, his wife, and their young son. They are vilified on television and online, particularly on Sam's Facebook. Their parenting is constantly questioned. In short time, they are questioning themselves: Did they make this happen? Kate and Bill had been drifting apart for some time, to the point where Bill was actively looking for a new place to live. The tragedy doesn't immediately bring them together, and it doesn't immediately drive them farther apart. Rather, they each drift some more, apart not just from each other but from reality. They blame themselves. They blame each other. They don't blame anyone. They continue on.

There's hardly a note in the movie that doesn't ring true. These characters are not caricatures, and they aren't archetypes, either. Both Bill and Kate seem completely believable, and with the tragedies in places such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, they are characters who very much feel like they could be living next door to us right now. That they are trashed and widely hated is understandable, and luckily neither character lacks the self-awareness to grasp why people are so mad. Bill reasons that the public wants to believe that the couple feels bad about what their son has done. They do, of course. They show their deepening anguish in different ways, but their devastation is complete. Their lives are seemingly ruined.

But this is not a movie without any hope. The subject matter is gruesome, but it's not tiresome. What we see are real reactions from realistic people. There are no real good guys, just a couple of people who've suddenly lost their way. Whether they regain it is almost immaterial, just as it's almost immaterial whether they regain it together. For us, it's the journey from their discovery through the passage of a week or so that's the true endgame. Neither does the film wallow in sentimentality for the sake of making us feel good. The true moments of joy are fleeting, just as they can be in real life. Even a dark movie can contain passionate performances.

Kate (Maria Bello) and Bill (Michael Sheen) have been struggling with their marriage for years and have decided to give it one final go before actually calling it quits. One night while planning their huge family vacation, their son Sam (Kyle Gallner) calls and seems quite out of it. Both Kate and Bill seem worried but feel that Sam is just having a rough time during his first semester away at college. The next day, life goes on as normal until the couple is notified that their has been a mass shooting at their son's college. Its only a matter of hours before Bill and Kate's already troubled life gets worse as they learn that Sam is not only dead, but the one who began to shoot up the school. A raw, realistic, and heart-wrenching look into our society ensues...

Man, do I love movies like this! I love movies that dare to tackle subject matters that our society just completely ignores. Beautiful Boy is not only a realistic tale about a crumbling marriage, but also a unique look at the family of a trouble college student who did the unthinkable. In a time where school shootings are at an all time high, there comes a movie like this that dares to examine the subject matter from a unique perspective. For years after mass shooting at various schools like Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, and of course the notorious Columbine, its about time some filmmaker dared to take a look into this subject and from the parents point of view.

When we hear about school shootings, we always think about the crazy kid who shot up the school, but we never question for a second, what about the parents and how are they taking the news. The media tends to point the blame at the parents and state that they must have screwed the kid up and caused him/her to do that. Why purely blame the parents? Why isn't it on our society? The media? Or even just the large amount of hate in this world. No one can deny that there are some crazy people in this world, but the question that remains is who is to blame and what would ever bring a person to take on such horrific action? No one knows and this film doesn't necessarily answer that questions, but instead does show how hard the parents not only take the loss, but how it makes them feel as people who have to live with knowing what their child is a killer.

While this film not only tackles that difficult subject matter; it also takes a brutally honest look at divorce and the basic struggles of every day life. Many husbands and wives stay together for the kids in our society today. I personally know several people that have stood together for the years when their marriage was on the rocks. Beautiful Boy shows this with Bill and Kate throughout the film and how the couple goes through periods where their love is strong and where it is weak. There is a huge fight scene near the end of the film in which Kate and Bill begin to violently argue about the relationship and whose fault it is that Sam turned out the way he did. That scene would bring tears to the eyes of any couple who has a kid or wants a child. It is gripping, raw, and unforgettable.

In order for this film to work as perfectly as it did, it clearly depended on Maria Bello and Michael Sheen to give realistic and believable performances. Needless to say, they nail it and gave some powerful and gut-wrenching performances. The chemistry and tension that they face is as real as any that I have seen in real life. When they are happy on screen, you are happy and when they are sad and miserable, you are sad and miserable. This film is clearly a character study of Kate and Bill and while there are some great supporting roles its really only those two who we as audience members are focused on. Bello and Sheen are the ones knock this film out of the park and give some truly Oscar worthy performances.

I applaud director/writer Shawn Ku as well as co-writer Michael Armbruster for creating a film that makes our society look at life, marriage, and adolescent violence from a whole new perspective. The script was well written and the scenes were placed perfectly throughout the film to make the movie keep the audience wanting more. The emotional scenes in this film were beautifully captured by Shawn Wu, who seems to have an eye for detail on capturing raw emotion from his actors. With Wu's direction, Beautiful Boy feels makes the audience feel as though we are dealing with the events that are taking place on screen and as filmmakers that is a great accomplishment.

At the end of the day, Beautiful Boy is definitely not the feel good film of the summer, but is probably one of the most powerful and realistic films that I have seen in many years. It's real, raw, and brutally honest and I love that about indie films. I love feeling good when I go to a movie, but I also like movies that tackle issues that are relevant to our society today. This film does that and while many may not appreciate how honest of a film this is, I did and applaud everyone involved for taking on a film of this caliber. Beautiful Boy will more than likely be one of those films that around December of this year that will make it's way onto my " best of" list for the year.

It seems that Hollywood, especially lately, has been in the habit of giving us films dealing with parents suffering the loss of a child. We see them scream, we see them cry, we see them go through the same routine. Beautiful Boy takes this theme and puts a unique, much more tragic, spin on it. Michael Sheen and Maria Bello play parents who lose their college-age son, but worse is their son died after shooting up his school. So along with them having to grieve the loss of their boy, they have to suffer the scrutiny of the media attacking their son and them publicly, along with fighting themselves in trying to figure out what led to this awful thing happening. They fight with whether they're responsible, whether they should take time to grieve or try to go back into things and as many other things as you can think of in this struggle for normalcy in understanding when everything else is fighting against them.

Of course anything dealing with themes like this gives way to a lot of opportunity for melodrama. There's a subplot with a novelist that is very silly and expected and a few other scenes that rang false, but for the most part the film was surprisingly honest and from the heart. These characters suffer in real ways and even though the film initially splits the two into stereotypes, Bello having the hysterical screams and disbelief and Sheen with the stunned silence, as it progresses they both go through phases of devastation, denial and just a need to understand and get past it. It doesn't do anything particularly unique in how they grieve, but the two performers make you feel everything these characters go through. They bring a lot of power to their roles and it can definitely hit very hard at times.

Both Sheen and Bello have always been fine actors who rarely get the chance to demonstrate their immense talents. Here they are given full opportunity to let their skills show and neither of them hesitate to do so. Whether they are having a shouting match in a hotel room, consoling one another in tears or just silently trying to deal with this huge tragedy, it's hard to take your eyes off either of them. It definitely goes down the expected path, but these two make it well worth watching with their powerhouse performances and I did admire the slight turn on what had kind of become a tired setup. Making the son this kind of person added a lot of layers to the struggle these two had to go through.