I love a good story about drug or alcohol addiction. And I love great actors who constantly bring it in their roles. So I had super high expectations for Felix Van Groeningen Beautiful Boy, the true story of the relationship between an 18-year-old son (Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name, Hostiles) battling drugs and his father (Steve Carell – Foxcatcher, Battle of the Sexes) who is willing to do anything to fix the problem, but is unsuccessful in all of his attempts. The trailer definitely made it seem like my type of movie. I should have been wary of the 67% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was encouraged by the 77% audience score. But as I watched this from the lens of a critic, I kept circling back to the same question. If you had these actors in place, you could have done hundreds, even thousands, of different stories about addiction. So why did they pick this story? It wasn’t anything special. It lacked vision. Van Groeningen, as a novice director, was completely in over his head, and he wasted the performance of both of its leads by telling a story of a story that wasn’t unique, was stale in its delivery, and left us feeling unattached to its characters. In a word, Beautiful Boy  underwhelmed.

Beautiful Boy was doomed from the start. In its opening scene, David Sheff (Carell) is at the office of an addiction expert telling him about his son and his son’s addiction and asking the man what he can do to help his son. The following scene flashes back one year when son Nic (Chalamet) is a senior in high school and first experimenting with illegal drugs. Here’s the problem…there are no distinguishable physical characteristics between present-day and the one-year flashback. Not only that, but we don’t know how often or when we go back and forth between the two time periods. It’s completely confusing and maddening, considering how simple it could have been. For example, Carell had a beard throughout the movie. If you’re trying to show the flashback scenes, take the beard off of him and give him a goatee. Or give Chalamet a different haircut. Something. Did we even need the first scene to show us that David tried everything and then some to understand his son’s addiction? Absolutely not. The entire story could have started one year in the past and slowly worked up to the present day. It wouldn’t have made it a better movie, but it would have made it less frustrating.

I’m honestly not quite sure how attentively that Beautiful Boy looked at drug addiction. Some might say it’s a harrowing look at it, and others might say it downplayed how destructive it is. I tend to go with the latter. There are some heavy addiction movies out there. Some of the better ones out there include Flight, Shame, Half Nelson, The Basketball Diaries, Candy, Requiem for a Dream, Traffic, When a Man Loves a Woman, Rush, Crazy Heart, Drugstore Cowboy, Blow, The Fighter, Leaving Las Vegas, Trainspotting, Everything Must Go, and the very recently released A Star Is Born. While each of these movies tells its own unique story, they all dig deeper into the realities of addiction and its relentlessness. There is no sugarcoating addiction and any of these movies. And while Beautiful Boy didn’t sugarcoat anything either, I was never immersed in its story. I thought that Carell and Chalamet were great individually, but this didn’t grab me as a true father/son relationship. And I don’t blame that on either actor. I don’t really blame it on the script. I blame it on the film’s direction, which, quite honestly, was very, very poor. I did appreciate the attempts to examine those who are affected by someone else’s addiction rather than the addict himself, but it just didn’t measure up to what I wanted it to be. I didn’t need sentimentalism just to have sentimentalism and evoke tears from the audience (though there were people in my theatre who were crying). In fact, Carell played his character so well that you knew he was a loving father and husband, was good at fixing things that were broken, but who, over the course of the film, was transformed, coming to terms that he could love his son, but he could not fix him. Carell’s portrayal of David stayed within the perfect range of a rational father who was broken by his son’s pain, made at himself for not realizing it sooner,, and tormented for not being able to help break him of his addiction. In fact, the number one thing that Van Groeningen did right was to stay away from so many of the same cliches that damage many other movies about addiction. Sure we see the internal damages that the disease can do to the abuser and to those who care for that person, but we weren’t swept away in this way that lost the other elements of the movie. In fact, unlike most addiction movies that seem to get bleaker and bleaker as the movie progresses, we have rays of sunshine freckled in, albeit not totally in an effective way because of the not quickly being able to identify what is going on in the present versus what is going on in the past.

This movie ultimately is more about a father than it is his drug-addicted son. Any parent wants to be able to help their child. There isn’t a hurdle that a parent won’t go through to protect their son or daughter. But what happens when the child is going through something that isn’t fixable, like a broken leg, like an enormous debt, like a place to live, like overcoming the loss of a pet? Addiction is scary. In all of its forms, addiction is scary. Even the addictions that you might think are good (like the need to exercise every single day) become scary because these things start to control your life. And when addiction sets in, there is no magic formula to turn it off. The addicted have to battle the wily disease head-on, and even that might not be enough. Addiction is the devil in its most treacherous and deceiving form. It gives us a home when we are homeless. It fills our hearts when it previously felt like we had a big black hole. It’s heartbreaking and is not something we would wish on our worst enemy.

I go back to what I said in the first paragraph of this review. Van Groeningen could have done any movie on addiction, but this was the one that he picked. It’s comparable to a film like Invictus.  For so long, we patiently waited for Morgan Freeman to portray Nelson Mandela on the big screen. And after years and years of waiting, we got our wish, and the film that we got was Invictus, a fine enough film directed by Clint Eastwood, but far more about South Africa’s unlikely run to the 1995 rugby championship than a story about Mandela. Eastwood had the perfect person to tell one of many stories that he could have told about Mandela, but Invictus was the story he picked. The same can be said about Beautiful Boy. Carell and Chalamet were at Van Groeningen’s disposal, but this unemotional story wasted the performances of these Oscar-nominated actors.

Besides the lack of clarity with the storytelling and not feeling connected with any of the characters, there was a component missing about how addiction affects others. Yes, we had David, and his story was perfect. And we also had Karen (Maura Tierney – Showtime’s The Affair, NBC’s ER), Nic’s stepmother, who loved him like her very own son and was deeply affected by his addiction. And we also had Vicki (Amy Ryan – HBO’s The Wire, NBC’s The Office) as Nic’s mom. Vicki lives in Los Angeles (David lives in San Francisco), and though we don’t know how it happened, David ended up with custody of Nic. David and Vicki, I believe, only share the screen once, but there are numerous phone conversations where they did what you would expect them to do…not really placing the blame on each other, but trying to take the blame off of themselves. The dynamic of this relationship and its progression is done well, with each parent focusing less on blaming the other and more on the care of their son. Nic also had a girlfriend in Lauren (Kaitlyn Dever – Short Term 12, FX’s Justified), a fellow addict. The relationship didn’t work. It was rushed and not fully developed. It was incorporated to show that Nic had someone besides his family because we don’t see any of his friends. He also has two young half-siblings, who he loves very much. But even they aren’t affected by his drug use.

This film didn’t work for me, though I have lots of respect for movies that do their best to portray addiction in the most realistic way that they can. And also seems like this movie really paid due diligence to what really happened and didn’t veer from the facts in an attempt to Hollywoodize the story.

Plot 6/10
Character Development 6/10
Character Chemistry 6/10
Acting 7.5/10
Screenplay 5.5/10
Directing 4/10
Cinematography 7/10
Sound 10/10 (surprisingly effective, varying from grunge music from Nirvana to Jazz to dark melodic beats that you’d often associate with a horror movie)
Hook and Reel 5/10
Universal Relevance 10/10 (drug addiction is a huge problem in our country…it has been for a long time, and despite our knowledge about its negative effects, the trends and usage continue to go in the wrong direction…any movie that tries to do right by bringing light to this issue is going to get a high score from me in this category, even if, like with Beautiful Boy, it doesn’t do the best job of portraying it)