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.