Beautiful Boy grapples with tales of addiction

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This article was published 26/10/2018 (2898 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like the tragic figure at its centre, director Felix Van Groeningen’s film Beautiful Boy is filled with potential, being an adaptation of two different books describing the same crisis in one American family.

The crisis is drug addiction. The screenplay was adapted from the Nic Sheff’s book Tweak, about his own struggles with a major, multi-faceted drug habit, most notably meth. But the screenplay also encompasses the book Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, Nic’s father, relating the strains of Nic’s addiction from his perspective and that of his family.

It can be a hard watch, simply because the addict’s story is typically a roller-coaster of recovery and relapse. Sometimes, it feels like the film is imitating the beats of a horror movie: just when you think the hero has escaped from the creature, it rises from the swamp yet again.

But, of course, the film studiously avoids setting that kind of hysterical pitch to the proceedings. The film’s milieu is very much set in an upper-middle class not-so-safe space. David Sheff (a sombre Steve Carell) is a successful freelance writer. Divorced from his first wife (Amy Ryan), he has custody of their son Nic (Timothée Chalamet of Call Me By Your Name) and is also raising two younger kids with his second wife Karen (Maura Tierney).

As he prepares to enter college, Nic is a lithe, handsome package of aspiration — a high-achieving student ready to conquer the world.

But Nic is himself conquered by substances. He can’t say no to pot or alcohol. And when the opportunity for the partaking of harder drugs arises, he embraces them with unfiltered recklessness. When the drugs start to take over his life, as addictive drugs must, his loving, well-intended father struggles to understand how his beloved boy could so wholly relinquish his life to dope.

Made in the shadow of an opioid addiction epidemic, the film necessarily plays out scenes that will ring familiar to many, as when Nic tried to con his father out of money to feed his habit, or ends up near death in an emergency room following an overdose.

It is the film’s quirkier moments that occasionally help the film transcend the addiction melodrama. David, ever the reporter, decides to try meth himself in an attempt to understand the drug’s grip on his son. He also guiltily recalls sharing a joint with his son in a moment that takes on the weight of culpability as Nic’s addictions spin ever more out of control.

Chalamet is a very appealing young actor, and he admirably tests the limits of that appeal with a role that acknowledges the addict at his most dishonest and manipulative.

Carell, his zany comedy past growing ever more distant, throws himself into the role of a man who must come to terms with the fact that, even if his son survives, the child he once knew is forever lost.

Even so, the film fails to achieve the balance it must have sought in adapting father-and-son memoirs in the first place. Van Groeningen seems hesitant to explore how Nic was so completely enticed in the first place. Sure, the filmmaker doesn’t want to be party to a film that might encourage the use of hard drugs. But there are films — 1996’s Trainspotting comes to mind — which portray the appeal of the addict’s dream world while still acknowledging the habit will only exacerbate the nightmare.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing