Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell's Beautiful Car: Review by EW TIFF

Beautiful boy (2018)

type

Movie

Kind

Drama

release date

12/10/18

interpreter

Steve Carell, Timothee Chalamet

director

Felix Van Groeningen

mpaa

R

We gave him a B

Drug addiction histories can end up in different ways, but they have only two ends: sobriety or death. Handsome boy allows you to stay on this line for almost all of its running time, and sometimes it looks less like a movie than an endurance test – one that is done with love, meticulously but almost like in real life: an impressive series of ups and downs and recoveries, without the necessary anchor of a consistent arc.

Nic Sheff (Timothy Chalamet) is a smart and sensitive teenager, neither more nor less obviously damaged than any child of divorce raised in the bohemian privilege of Marin County, Northern California. He likes music, surfing and drawing in his notebook, but nothing makes him feel like a drug. First of all, it's the grass, then the cocaine, the pills and its kryptonite, methamphetamine. Nic's journalist father, David (Steve Carrell), discusses his son's addiction as a problem he can solve by applying his skills: asking questions, talking to experts, writing him down. Nic can not stop, though, and he can not be repaired.

Francois Duhamel / Amazon Studios

It is difficult to imagine the film, based on the two memoirs of Sheff, working without Chalamet; He is beautiful – like a boy on a Greek urn, with a crack running through it. And his performance feels both beautifully calibrated and lived; alternately mild and adducted, furious and catatonic. He enlivens around his younger siblings and seems to find himself at his entrance to the university and meet a girl. But just a bottle of prescription in the bathroom of a dinner to send it back, and while it stumbles in hospitals and drug rehab centers, the people who l & rsquo; Love – his father, his mother (Amy Ryan), his mother-in-law (Maura Tierney) – hope in triage and despair.

The acting game is consistently excellent and the movie looks incredibly big. with his indie-rock soundtrack and lush, beautifully shot landscapes, Belgian filmmaker Felix Van Groeningen (Break in the broken circle) Oddly reminiscent of the aesthetics of Jean Marc Vallée's recent miniseries of prestige Big Little Lies; except instead of Monterey and murder, it's Marin and methamphetamine cooked in tablespoons. Even though the story is winding back and forth, Carrell and Chalamet are too good not to worry you; in the end, however, Boy just exhaust yourself. B