Beau is Afraid: surreal odyssey or three-hour anxiety attack?

The actor’s performance as a late-40s man with a medicine cabinet full of problems deserves four stars.

Joaquin Phoenix in Beau is Afraid

Beau is Afraid (R18+)
In cinemas
★★★★

The youngish American auteur Ari Aster has two genuinely scary horror movies to his credit: Hereditary (2018), starring Toni Collette, and Midsommar (2019).

His third film, Beau is Afraid, starring the extraordinary Joaquin Phoenix, takes him to a whole new level. You know how some films resist genre-fication? This is one of them.

It’s not horror but it’s unnervingly frightening. It’s not a tragedy but it’s deeply sad. It’s not a comedy but it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

If I had to put a label on it, I’d go for surreal odyssey or three-hour anxiety attack. It depends on how much of what we see on the screen over 179 minutes is actually happening.

It may all be real, it may be part true or it may exist entirely inside the head of the titular Beau Wasserman (Phoenix), a late-40s man who seems to have a medicine cabinet full of problems.

Early on he runs into the janitor in his apartment building. He doesn’t say anything but the janitor looks at him and says “You’re f--ked pal.” He does not elaborate.

As I watched, I thought of Aster’s veteran compatriot David Lynch, a master of the compulsively indecipherable. Indeed in one deeply weird scene – the one I suspect is most responsible for the R rating – he out-Lynches Lynch.

To say Beau lives in a low-rent area is an understatement. The graffiti in the foyer of his building reads “Kill Children” and “F--k the Pope”. There is a strip club next door and the local grocer is called Cheapo Depot. One assumes this is where he buys O’Loha cereal, which combines “the best of Hawaii and Ireland”.

Gunshots can be heard in the street and the TV news covers the latest attack by a naked man who chases people and stabs them. The police describe the Birthday Boy Stabber as circumcised and white. At one point Beau runs naked into the street at the same time the naked knifeman is there and a young cop doesn’t know who to shoot.

At least this is what we see. Whether any of it happens is anyone’s guess. Ditto for the following: we learn that Beau’s mother is a corporate high-flyer who lives in a town named after her and that his father died the exact moment his son was conceived. We’re told something good then bad happens and Beau needs to make the trip to his mother’s town.

Whether it’s real or imagined, Phoenix is superb as a man living on the fringe of society, on the edge of himself, as he is in his Oscar-winning role in Joker (2019). It’s not what he says, but the look in his eyes when he says it, or when he is silent. Like Homer’s Odyssey, this is a story told in extended set pieces, which works well considering the long running time.

In one of them, a part-animated idea of the life Beau might have had, the Polish-Canadian cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski and Australian production designer Fiona Crombie work wonders.

One of the highlights is when Beau has an accident and recuperates with a couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who are kind on the outside but perhaps less so underneath. Also living with them is a seemingly deranged war veteran.

Lane is effortlessly funny but there are moments – a flicker on his face – that suggest something darker is going on. He says he’s a surgeon and tells Beau he’s “a lucky man”, which conjures the horrific hospital scenes from Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 film O Lucky Man!

Phoenix is the mesmerising centre of this film. The support cast is terrific, including Patti LuPone as Beau’s mother and Parker Posey as his now-adult teenage crush. Bill Hader has a don’t-miss-it cameo as a UPS delivery guy.

If you like mind-bending films that have unanswered questions at the end, middle and beginning, then you won’t be scared of Beau is Afraid.

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Judy Blume Forever (CTC)
Amazon Prime
★★★½

“Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by about six different guys.”

That opening line to Judy Blume’s 1975 young adult novel Forever goes to the crux of why the American author has topped both the bestseller charts and banned books lists.

She started out with children’s picture books – an “imitation Dr Zeus”, in her words – before moving to what is now called YA fiction, where she wrote explicitly about puberty, menstruation, masturbation and sex.

Her tell-it-like-it-is approach won approval from her young readers and disapproval from some of their parents and other adult custodians. “I wanted to write the truth; the reality of being that age,’’ she says.

The “children reading filth” charge was there from the beginning but the censors sharpened their blue pencils when Ronald Reagan moved into the Oval Office in 1981.

Judy Blume Forever, directed by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, is a documentary about the 85-year-old author, who is interviewed, as are her friends, fans and foes.

The filmmakers also draw on archival interviews so we see and hear from Blume at different times in her thrice-married life and 50-year literary career.

There’s a telling moment from 1984 on the TV talk show Crossfire. Reagan confrere Pat Buchanan repeatedly asks why she is preoccupied with sex. Her response turns the tables.

Judy Sussman, born in New Jersey in 1938, did what a “good girl” was supposed to do: go to college, meet a man – in her case fellow student John Blume – become a wife and mother.

“I played at being a married lady,’’ she says. “I went from being my parents’ little girl to John’s little wife and I was lost.”

She decided to find herself by writing. A mountain of rejection slips followed. Then there was an acceptance. She spent the $US350 advance on an electric typewriter.

Her breakthrough YA novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, was published in 1970. “Writing Margaret gave me a sense of who I was and what I may be able to do,’’ she says.

In a case of good timing for this documentary, a film adaptation will be in cinemas from April 28, starring Abby Ryder Fortson as pre-teen Margaret and Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates as her mother and grandmother.

Five years later it was Forever… (Blume explains the ellipsis) that caused the greatest outcry. The author received death threats.

The book’s most dog-eared page is 85, where Ralph makes an appearance. He is not a boy but part of a boy. That goes to what makes this documentary timely. Last month a Florida school principal was forced to resign after showing students a picture of Michelangelo’s statue of David, where his Ralph, or perhaps Raffaele, is visible.

Some well known names are among Blume’s fans. “Everything I learned about sex I learned from Judy,’’ says the actor Molly Ringwald, star of teen dramas such as The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.

A highlight, though, is the letters from Blume’s ordinary young readers. This one’s from a girl: “Dear Judy, I love your books. I am interested in sex. I am 10.” This one’s from a boy: “Dear Judy, please tell me the facts of life in number order.”

Blume wrote back and Yale University is home to a half-century of correspondence between writer and readers. It’s the sort of pen-on-paper treasure trove that I suspect will become less common in the digital age.

Blume has written adult novels, the first of which, Wifey (1978), is about a New Jersey housewife, which Blume was at the time, having an affair. “It was close to home, I admit,’’ she says.

Her now-adult children are interviewed and the author laughs as she recalls them, in their mid-teens, reading one of her books that included oral sex. “They said, ‘We never knew you knew all that!’.’’

This 97-minute documentary does not have a classification but its topics are M rated. Its strength is that Blume, whose books have sold about 90 million copies, is still with us to tell her side of the story. “A book can not harm a child,’’ she says. Not everyone agrees with her.