Storytellers have sought effective ways to engage the fairly recent, unfathomable phenomenon of children committing mass murder of other children. With Elephant, in 2003, Gus Van Sant came closest to a direct narrative address of events based on the 1999 massacre at Columbine high school. Using the dreamlike, slow-motion realism that characterized his so-called "Death Trilogy," Van Sant captured the mind's resistance to cataclysmic horror, particularly in spaces and situations of presumed safety. We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel recently adapted for the screen by Lynne Ramsey, is a mother's story of disaffection from her bizarre and increasingly unlovable son. The event itself is the novel's purposefully anti-climactic twist -- held off until the end and largely elided.
Now comes Beautiful Boy, writer (with Michael Armbruster) and director Shawn Ku's feature debut. In the opening scene, college freshman Sammy (Kyle Gallner) reads an elegiac lament over home-movie images of his family playing on the beach in happier, more cohesive times. In fact he's in a creative writing seminar, and his peers respond to his story with hair-twirling indifference. Back at home, Sammy's parents Kate and Bill (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen) are suspended in marital autopilot, circling the divorce they've postponed, supposedly for Sammy's sake, and stalling out on fumes. After a last phone call home -- teary but remote Sammy is dispatched quickly by his father and plied with bromides by his mother -- the film belongs to the unhappy couple, and to the guilt, denial, rage, mutual blame, defeat, and release that become Ku's focus in the immediate, intimate aftermath of what happens next.
Whose fault is it when someone not yet fully launched into the world launches a pre-emptive attack against it? Ku comes at this question indirectly but frequently, letting the claustrophobic tightness of handheld camerawork examine foremost what traumatic grief looks like at close range. Initially the topnote of each character's personality is magnified: Kate flies headlong into denial; Bill falls back deeper into catatonia. Within hours their suburban home becomes a staging ground, the details of their private lives now part of a larger, public story. The temptation to seek those indicting details ourselves is baited and then checked throughout the film; the urge to trace the narrative backward competes with the invitation to share, via stylized rawness, in their grief.
The muddy contrasts of what appears to be digital film is coupled with camerawork that circles, dodges, and swings between characters, a technique that's as disorienting as it's meant to be and then some. There is not an establishing shot in the movie, and everything we learn about what Sammy actually perpetrated comes from fragments on various television screens. It's a story we already know, Ku seems to say, making a pointed and yet not quite comfortable generic contrast to what we witness in more human detail. Bill and Kate move from their barricaded home into that of Kate's brother (Alan Tudyk) and his wife (Moon Bloodgood), who have a young son of their own. Kate exerts her will to control, alienating her sister-in-law, and Bill pleads to be allowed back to a workplace no more ready for him than he is for it.
Bello is, as usual, a compellingly feminine force in the part of a woman in free fall, grasping at branches on her way down. Kate is a copy editor who has taken to red-penning her surroundings, and even her lived-in beauty is efficient, not wasting one more millimeter than is necessary to get the job done. Her face is another unlikely battlefield for the violence being done to her life. Sheen, with his pulled-up nose and small, hanging mouth, is often the picture of winsome (or conniving) surprise. Here he has a clogged, baggy-eyed dignity, and its ultimate release is moving and true.
The couple repair to a motel when their welcome wears out at Kate's brother's home, and you can see the bout of healing lovemaking coming from Meat Loaf's appearance at the check-in desk. The two scenes that precede the groove retrieval, however, are rare and surprising pieces of filmmaking. A single, long shot of Kate, partially obscured as she sits in a nearby diner, waiting for her husband, is an extraordinary portrait of solitude, alienation, and sudden, overwhelming despondence. Bello is frankly magnificent, matched in the next scene, as the couple get drunk on whiskey and vending machine booty, by Sheen's mordantly funny take on blissful, wasted mischief. The avid, agile camerawork pairs well with both scenes, and equally poorly with the post-lovemaking, motel room cage match that sends the two flying apart again.
The film loses momentum after that, although Kate's run-in with one of her clients, a crafty novelist gunning for material, is apt. Some of the holes in the film's approach emerge, and the lack of attention to context means at times that the signal event feels less like an organic part of the story than a device. And anyone who saw Blue Valentine knows you don't need a killing spree as a pretext for a really crap night at a dodgy motel. Ultimately, the effort, however rough in patches, is to be admired. We need our best minds on this subject, in multiple arenas, and Beautiful Boy is another jagged, early piece in a puzzle whose borders haven't formed yet.