Beautiful Boy

Dir: Felix van Groeningen

2018

*****

Felix Van Groeningen’s 2018 film Beautiful Boy is remarkable on several levels. It’s a touching and brutally honest depiction of drug addiction and the effect it has on relationships but shown from two different angles. The screenplay is based on the memoirs Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction by David Sheff and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by his son Nic Sheff and its surprisingly low on schmaltz. Luke Davies’ screenplay successfully avoids showing the two different angles as contrasting films or differing points of view and concentrates mostly on the events both memoirs cross over on. While David Sheff clearly researched drug addiction, the film doesn’t attempt to belittle addicts and suggest why anyone would become one, but rather deals with the Sheff family itself. Paramount Pictures and Plan B Entertainment acquired the film rights to both memoirs back in 2008 but seemingly didn’t know how to approach it. It was announced in 2011 that writer and director Cameron Crowe had written a script based on the books and that he was looking to direct the film after he had wrapped his romantic film Aloha, with New Regency getting involved in this project after Paramount dropped out. In December 2013, it was reported that Mark Wahlberg was circling the project to play the role of the father. However, in 2015 it was announced that Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen had taken over as director with a new script written by Australian writer Luke Davies. I think this was a vital move. Cameron Crowe has his own unique style of American cinema but I don’t think Beautiful Boy would have suited it. There are many other American directors I can think of who could come close to what the film should have looked like but I can’t think of any who would have been better than Van Groeningen. His 2012 film The Broken Circle Breakdown is one of the greatest non-American American films of modern times and the mood and his observational style are perfectly suited to such a story. It is also important that Luke Davies was attached as screenwriter, Davies being a former heroin addict himself. Both men gave the film the authenticity it deserved. Steve Carell played the father like no other actor could – the father anybody would want and the father everyone could see themselves as. Will Poulter was initially attached to play the son but I’m glad that the role eventually went to Timothée Chalamet. I’m not hating on Poulter, he’s proved his worth time and time again when no one thought he was right for the role but I genuinely don’t think he would have been right here, where Chalamet was in his element. Chalamet is fast becoming an actor to watch, indeed, if he’s in it, I’m interested. His style of acting, which I suppose you could could call method in the classical sense, is lending itself well to the young actor. His passion is met by his ability and it’s quite a relief to see such an important subject and a real-life character being respected and played with such enthusiasm. Watching Chalamet and Carell together felt authentic and I believed they were father and son. Maybe it’s because I’d recently become a father to a beautiful boy myself just before watching, but I found their relationship to be tender, heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. Again, I found this all to be suitably authentic. I was surprised to learn that the editing of the film took seven months in total, meaning that the movie was completely re-cut, multiple times. Initially Nico Leunen, Van Groeningen's long-time collaborator, was not involved in the project but when Van Groeningen became dissatisfied with the editing process he brought Leunen to Los Angeles to reconstruct the film. That’s a lot of time in the movie making business, so it’s good to see a bit of leniency given by the studio for the sake of art and the story’s integrity. It’s great when a complex story and an important subject are given the best treatment and Beautiful Boy is the perfect example of passion and integrity in action to produce a respectful and compelling adaptation.