A father struggles with his son's addiction

Beautiful Boy grapples with a big subject without achieving full success.

An addiction drama starring Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell, Beautiful Boy deals with a father who desperately tries to help his talented, once-promising 18-year-old son kick a meth habit.

Chalamet's performance and the painful relevance of the movie's subject carry it a long way, but Beautiful Boy falls short of the dramatic powerhouse that surely must have been intended.

Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen tells the story of David Sheff (Carell), a successful freelance journalist who finds it impossible to accept his son’s precipitous decline. Nic (Chalamet) has gone from being a model child with a glowing future to a drug-addicted loser who seems permanently to have lost his way. Somehow, Nic has stumbled into a death spiral of a life.

Shackled to flashbacks to healthier times, the movie grinds away at our sympathies by showing the halting (and vaguely monotonous) ways in which Nic's cycle of recovery and relapse unfolds.

Based on books by both the real father and son (David Sheff's Beautiful Boy and Nic Sheff's Tweak), the movie casts its heaviest gaze on Carell's character. David and his artsy second wife (Maura Tierney) have two additional children, but most of David's attention is absorbed by Nic's increasingly powerful addiction. No matter how hard Dad tries, he’s unable to push Nic's life back on track.

The movie asks an audience to become involved in the struggles of a family that seems to fit most known definitions of "privileged." I know a few freelance writers and they don't seem to be living as well as Carell's David, a journalist who has a wonderfully appealing house in Northern California.

Perhaps director Van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown) sees that as part of the point. Even the well-heeled of Marin County can't immunize their kids from the scourge of drugs. It's possible for parents to do all the right things and still be blindsided by tragedy.

A bearded, super-earnest Carell carries a major burden here. He must show David's desire for control, his journalistic inquisitiveness (at one point he even tries drugs himself) and a father's one-note persistence when it comes to his wayward son. Looking drearily somber, Carell isn't entirely up to the task.

Riding high on praise from his work in Call Me By Your Name, Chalamet continues to impress as a smart kid who knows how to rationalize his drug use. He says meth enables him to see a drab black-and-white world in color. Chalamet also hints at Nic's rebellion against being a creative, success-bound child and budding writer.

Nic's decline comes into sharpest focus when he and a girlfriend (Kaitlyn Dever) hit low points of homelessness and physical decay on the streets of San Francisco.

I suppose the movie deserves credit for not specifying exactly why Nic has become an addict. Instead of providing pat answers, Beautiful Boy asks us to share in the torments of its characters, but it can feel like a tutorial on the way drug addiction impacts families.

A screenplay credited to Luke Davies (Lion) and Van Groeningen hints that for Nic to abandon his drug habit, David must let go of a carefully constructed image of his son, an intriguing idea but one that probably doesn't come into sharp enough focus as the movie wends its way through an often-exhausting 111 minutes.

A summer romance in Italy

Elio falls for Oliver in a story set in 1983, but Call Me By Your Name seems as much about the seductions of summer as the seductions of sex.

Call Me By Your Name -- the much-acclaimed movie from director Luca Guadagnino -- stands as a love story between a 24-year-old man and a 17-year-old young man who's just discovering his sexuality. The age difference has put some folks off, but if you see Call Me By Your Name, you'll understand that Guadagnino's work has little to do with sexual exploitation.

The movie has more to do with what happens between two characters during the languid and irresistibly pleasant summer of 1983. Set in the northern Italian town of Crema and the surrounding countryside, Call Me By Your Name is a movie marinated in sensual pleasures, not all of them having to do with sex.

When young Elio Perlman (Timothee Chalamet in a career-making performance) speaks of going swimming, he's talking about a plunge into summer and you almost feel the gentle embrace of the pond where Elio and his friends swim.

The movie's context adds interest, as well. Chalamet's Elio isn't some sad, isolated figure; he lives with his mother and his father (Amira Casar and Michael Stuhlbarg). Stuhlbarg's Professor Perlman studies classical sculpture, particularly Greek renditions of the idealized male body. Each summer, Professor Perlman invites a promising grad student to work with him, helping to catalog his research.

In the summer of 1983, Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives to work with Perlman.

It's clear from the outset that Elio is taken with Oliver, something in the way that a young man might be taken with an older, more worldly and much more confident man. Perhaps sensing Elio's interest, Oliver reacts cautiously -- but he does react.

Working from a screenplay adapted by James Ivory from a novel by Andre Aciman, Guadagnino creates sensual scenes between Elio and Oliver and also makes it clear that Elio's hormones are raging. He has sex with a girl from town and satisfies himself with a juicy peach, a strange take on the TS Eliot line from the The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "Do I Dare to Eat A Peach."

Oliver and Elio spend their summer together, but it's also clear (at least to us) that Oliver will move on. He'll finish his internship, resume his life in the US and press the summer of 1983 into his book of distant memories.

Call Me By Your Name brims with warm-weather leisure: Elio plays classical piano, reads and sometimes hangs out with the local teen crowd. He also explains that his Jewish family believes in a kind of discreetly expressed Jewish identity. If the Perlman family belongs to any tribe, it's the tribe of international intellectuals.

The sex scenes between Elio and Oliver have been filmed as much to express sensitivity as desire, and it's Chalamet's performance as Elio that sets the tone.

Less well-defined, Oliver is a visitor in Elio's life and, in some ways, in the movie. You can see that as a flaw, but I assume that Guadagnino chose to present Oliver in this fashion. Despite being plenty smart, only Elio could have seen the relationship extending beyond the summer or maybe he had no real vision for it at all.

Although it doesn't occur until the end, a conversation between Professor Perlman and his son puts the story in context. Perlman's speech interprets the summer for Oliver from the perspective of an older and impressively tolerant man who understands that pleasure and pain exist on a continuum and that experiencing one means not shutting out the possibility of the other.

You may wish to think of Call Me By Your Name as life on vacation -- and that means that the movie is as lost in summer idyl as its characters. I suppose that qualifies as a weakness, but this self-contained world functions like a cocoon that protects all those in it.

Does that make Call Me By Your Name a fantasy? Maybe, but in Guadagnino's hands, it's an artfully constructed one.

A coming-of-age movie with smarts

Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with the perceptive Lady Bird.

Lady Bird was so rapturously received on the fall festival circuit that when I finally saw this enjoyable coming-of-age movie, I was slightly taken aback by a level of critical enthusiasm that, for me at least, seemed excessive. I'll put some emphasis on the word "slightly" because I did find Lady Bird entertaining and worthy, a smart movie that picks its way through a well-worn genre without engendering any of the contempt usually bred by familiarity. That's because the movie's writer/director Greta Gerwig has a singular sensibility and because Gerwig, who does not appear in the movie, seems to be mining her own adolescent memories.

I don't know how much Lady Bird adheres to Gerwig's life, but the movie has been made with the kind of affectionate observation that suggests a strong connection between this fictional account and the reality of Gerwig's teen years.

To fully appreciate what Gerwig has accomplished, it's necessary to understand what she hasn't done. She introduces but doesn't overplay the story of a teenager who suddenly becomes friends with an attractive, popular girl and, as a result, ignores her best friend, someone who'll never be Homecoming Queen.

She includes a scene in which the movie's main character -- played by the emotionally supple Saoirse Ronan -- loses her virginity and winds up disappointed, a familiar teen-movie ploy but one that's freshened by Gerwig's idiosyncratic take on the collision between romantic expectation and reality. There's even a prom, but that, too, has its own off-kilter charms.

Although it doesn't always occupy center stage, the key relationship in Lady Bird revolves around Ronan's character and her mother, a psychiatric nurse played by Laurie Metcalf. The central issue in that relationship involves a mother's accusatory view of her daughter's aspirations, a sense that Ronan's Lady Bird (the name the character has chosen for herself) might be dreaming too big and, thus, heading for inevitable disappointment.

For her part, Lady Bird wants to escape what she views as the stultifying confines of Sacramento to attend college in the sophisticated East. Her mother wants her to stay closer to home, a preference that's not only geographical but metaphorical. Mom, who lives a conventional life with her newly unemployed husband (a fine Tracy Letts), may be envious of her daughter's desire to escape the weight of obligation.

The fact that Lady Bird -- a.k.a. Christine McPherson -- attends a Catholic high school adds more flavor. Happily, Gerwig resists caricature, presenting the school's faculty with sympathetic humor. Sister Sarah Joan (an amiable Lois Smith) displays unexpected humor. Father Leviatch (Stephen Henderson) runs the drama club but is subject to bouts of depression. When Father Leviatch takes a leave of absence, the junior varsity football coach (Bob Stephenson) substitutes, preparing the cast for a production of The Tempest as if he were giving a half-time pep talk to a roomful of jocks.

One of the movie's best scenes occurs when Lady Bird meets with Sister Sarah Joan to discuss her college essay. Sister Sarah observes that Lady Bird has written affectionately about Sacramento, the city she purportedly loathes. Lady Bird says that she guesses that she pays attention, and Sister Sarah comments that paying attention qualifies as a form of love.

The boys in Lady Bird's life become part of her growing-up process. Lucas Hedges, familiar from Manchester by the Sea, portrays Danny, a star of high school musicals. He becomes Lady Bird's first boyfriend, but the relationship takes a turn Lady Bird fails to anticipate.

Lady Bird later develops a relationship with Kyle (Timothee Chalamet), a teenager who seems to have watched too many James Dean movies, internalizing an alienated pose.

Nice work from Odeya Rush as a Jenna, the unbearably popular girl, and from Beanie Feldstein as Julie, Lady Bird's BFF and the total opposite of Rush's Jenna.

Gerwig, familiar as an actress from movies such as Francis Ha, has made her directorial debut with an easy touch that results in a crowd-pleasing entertainment. The best compliment I can give Lady Bird is to insist that it’s a movie about a particular teenager rather than another entry in Hollywood's endless stream of generic and often dim-witted coming-of-age movies.

Happily engaging and marked by Ronan's wit and vulnerability, Lady Bird introduces us to a young woman who's taking small and large steps on one of life's more exciting journeys: discovering herself.