What to make of ‘Beau is Afraid?’

   
   

    Artificial trees rotate, changing colors during the production of a play that's being staged outdoors in what seems like an enchanted forest.

   In a decaying urban neighborhood, the streets teem with miscreants, one of whom makes a habit of running about naked before repeatedly stabbing random passersby.

   A psychiatrist asks his patient whether he has thought about killing his mother.

   An aggressively cheerful suburban couple cares for a man the wife ran over with her car, putting him up in a room belonging to their snarly teenage daughter.

    On first impression, these images defy connection, but they're all part of director Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, a three-hour mashup of styles, locations, and concerns held together -- more or less -- by the performance of Joaquin Phoenix.

    The always adventurous Phoenix portrays Beau, a character whose interior life may be the sole source of this darkly funny, highly inventive, and sometimes wearying movie.

   In fairness to Aster's outsized ambitions, it would be wrong  either to advise viewers to see or avoid a movie that, at least for me, sustained involvement and sometimes amusement for nearly two hours and 30 minutes of its running time.

    Fearful and anxious, Beau serves as a springboard from which Aster launches a parade of images, many startling, eerie, and impressive. 

     Aster (Hereditary and Midsommnar) mixes humor with horror as he unleashes a wild psychological storm, much of it revolving around Beau's mother issues.

     We meet Mom in flashbacks and in the film's final segment. Zoe Lister-Jones plays Beau's mom as younger woman, and Armen Nehapetian portrays Beau as a 13-year-old whose sexual development can't escape Mom's supervisory attentions.

     In a bravura performance, Patti LuPone turns up as Beau's adult mom. Throughout the movie, Beau tries to reach Washington state for his mother's funeral, a conceit that takes him from slum, to suburbia, to forest, to a dazzlingly home in Washington. 

     Once unleashed, LuPone, launches into tirades fueled by furious resentment about how much she's sacrificed for Beau, a character who seems to be stuck in a some indeterminate limbo.

     Beau Is Afraid is so packed with characters and set pieces that it's impossible to mention all of them without writing a review that would rival the movie in length. 

    Highlight performances include: 

    Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan as a suburban couple who lost a son during a war in Caracas, Venezuela. No, the imagined seems to have nothing to do with anything.

    Kylie Rogers keeps up with the weirdness as the daughter of this suburban couple, who also house an emotionally damaged veteran (Denis Menochet) in a trailer in their backyard.

    Parker Posey appears in a sex scene that's both thematically significant and starkly funny.

    A beautiful, haunting animation sequence qualifies as a kind of character in itself.

    Hints of other movies waft through the weirdness. Maybe it's me, but I felt traces of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz.

    It's impossible to discuss the movie's ending without spoilers. All I'll say is that Aster seems to arrive at three points at which the story might be over. I experienced a letdown each time I realized that wasn't the case. Aster had more to show -- if not to say.

    Does of all this work? It's a fair question but one that admits of no simple answer. Watching Beau Is Afraid, I sometimes wondered whether it might have made a dozen brilliant short films. I  also wondered whether David Lynch could have hit the same kind of notes in a more economical two hours. 

   And, yes,  the overworked and somewhat stale mother/son dynamic wore itself out.

   And yet ... 

   Time may reveal whether Aster's movie should be considered a fragmented work of genius or an incoherent oddity or something else entirely. 

   Whatever it is, Beau Is Afraid deserves not to be dismissed.

The fight against a pedophile priest

It took me a while to commit to director Francois Ozon's By the Grace of God, a movie about the justice-seeking efforts of a group of men who, as children, had been abused by a pedophile priest. As adults, the men joined forces to seek some acknowledgment of what had happened to them, and, in some cases, to find peace for themselves. Ozon (Double Lover, Swimming Pool) focuses on the French city of Lyon, where the men live. Alexandre (Melvil Poupaud) begins the charge against the priest. Motivated by conscience, Alexandre remains faithful to the church. He and his family are practicing Catholics. As the movie develops, we learn that Alexandre wants to reform the church from the inside. Francois (Denis Menochet) takes another view. He joins the fray as an atheist. He, too, has a family but has given up on the Church. Swann Arlaud portrays Emmanuel, the most damaged of the men. Despite a genius IQ, he has wasted his life in failed relationships and chronic underachievement. Eric Caravaca portrays Gilles Perret, a level-headed surgeon who also joins the group. So why -- given the movie's topicality and the explosive nature of its subject -- did I have initial difficulty getting into the film? At first, By the Grace of God seems as if it's going to be an anti-church procedural. But Ozon carefully lays out the story, allowing its complexities to emerge as the men band together and the story deepens. Representatives of the Catholic Church don't fare well but aren't turned into caricatured villains, either. Francois Marthouret portrays Cardinal Barbarin, a churchman who knows how to be sympathetic while simultaneously doing nothing to address the problem of a pedophile priest. As the priest who abused the boys when they were Scouts, Bernard Verley creates a character who's contemptible and pathetic. The priest admits his wrong-doing but when he meets with any of the adult men for attempted reconciliations, he still seems to relate to them as children. In all, By the Grace of God winds up being about more than child abuse. It's also about the complex group dynamics that develop when victims seek justice and about the lasting impact of one of the most severe of all imaginable betrayals.

A recreation of a daring Israeli raid

7 Days in Entebbe isn't a bad movie, but it doesn't dig deep enough to be memorable.

In 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderbolt, a daring raid in which a small group of IDF soldiers rescued 102 Israelis who had been passengers on an Air France plane that was hijacked by two Germans and two Palestinians.

7 Days in Entebbe, a movie about the hijacking and subsequent Israeli action, arrives nearly 42 years after an event that riveted world attention. Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike headline the cast as German radicals who initially thought they were leading the charge but who quickly were surpassed by Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinians took charge once the plane arrived in Uganda, after a refueling stop in Benghazi, Libya. Once in Entebbe, hostages were housed in a decaying airport terminal that was no longer in use.

Movies such as 7 Days raise an obvious but unavoidable question. Why are we being asked to look at an event that since has been eclipsed by so many other events involving terrorist actions that put innocent civilians in harm's way? In part, the question can be answered with one sentence: Such events are inherently exciting and suspenseful.

But for a movie to succeed, it must get beyond that surface and dig deeper? As directed by Jose Padilha, 7 Days fails to function as more than a cinematic outline, offering quick looks into the motivation of the story's various players.

No stranger to tough, action-oriented movies, Padilha directed the Netflix series Narcos and made Bus 174, a documentary about hostages trapped on a bus in Rio. He also directed Elite Squad, a compelling Brazilian police drama. In 2014, Padilha tried his hand at a Hollywood reboot, a much-derided version of RoboCop .

7 Days emphasizes the importance of the moment at which the hijackers separated Jews from the non-Jews, evoking memories of Holocaust selections in the minds of the Jewish passengers and among the Israeli public.

The highest levels of the Israeli government also took note of the separate treatment of Jews as issues pertaining to saving the hostages were debated. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) took different sides.

Rabin knew he had to do something but wasn’t entirely sure that he should dismiss the possibility of negotiating with the Palestinians, something that went against Israeli policy forbidding talks with terrorists. Perez favored military action.

At one point, Uganda's Idi Amin (nicely played by Nonso Anozie) gets involved. He’s able to persuade the Palestinians to release the French hostages.

Padilha’s strangest decision involves the use of the Batsheva Dance Company which does a jarring musical version of Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), a song usually sung at Passover seders. Staged by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the dance -- seen in rehearsals and eventually in a performance -- proves compelling but because it opens the movie, it tends to upstage the rest of the story and it's never entirely clear why Padihla includes it.

To justify the dance sequence, the screenplay must introduce a superfluous tangent, a relationship between a dancer and one of the Israeli soldiers on the Entebbe raid.

Whatever Padihla was attempting to accomplish, he winds up looking a bit ridiculous when he alternates between a performance of the dance and the movie's climactic end-of-picture rescue.

There’s not much by way of character development among the crew and passengers, aside from a crew member (Denis Menochet) who tries to reason with Bruhl’s character, a publisher of radical books who already has his doubts about the role he’s chosen for himself as a German who may be called upon to kill Jews. The screenplay assigns Bruhl's character a role in saving the lives of the Jewish passengers.

Even Pike’s character, a Baader-Meinhof veteran and the more hardened of the two Germans, eventually admits she might have made a wrong choice.

Padilha knows how to give a realistic pulse to action, and the movie offers an important footnote at the end. Yonatan Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni), the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid, was the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister.

Eventually, the movie tells us that if peace ever is to be achieved, Israel must swallow hard and negotiate. 7 Days in Entebbe does little to make that conclusion feel like more than a faint hope, an afterthought rather than a genuine expression of conviction.