Nosh 131: 'Beautiful Boy,' 'Tea With the Dames' & More

David Elliott

    

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.
NOTE: Nosh 132 will appear on Friday, Nov. 30.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Beautiful Boy and Tea With the Dames

Beautiful Boy

Playing the drug-addicted drummer Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Frank Sinatra looked tortured by his own gaunt, stringy physique. His writhing heroin hell shocked viewers but didn’t get the expected Oscar (losing to Ernest Borgnine’s lovelorn butcher Marty, as did James Dean in East of Eden). Director Otto Preminger ram-jammed the jazz (great score), a predatory creep (Darren McGavin), Frankie’s women (deceitful, cloying Eleanor Parker and naïve, moony Kim Novak) and his “cold turkey” agony. The spirit of harsh melodrama has haunted drug drama ever since, but Beautiful Boy does not succumb.

There is a supple spine of substance: exceptionally fine performances by Steve Carell as Bay Area writer David Sheff and Timothée Chalamet as his teen, then 20s son, the addict Nic. Derived from their separate memoirs, the movie has flashbacks to adorable kid Nic and his devoted father. Then Chalamet takes over with the seemingly infallible, not smug naturalness that made him so very special in Call Me By Your Name. He looks like a Vogue revival of Donatello’s David, and the contrast with Carell’s rather pinched, regular-guy visage is a bonus. It underscores and resonates the emotional bond, as talented Nic spins off on hooked highs and bottom-crawling lows (mostly from crystal meth, which can damage the brain disastrously).

There is not much psychologizing, more the anguish of unknowable motives (Amy Ryan as Nic’s mom and Maura Tierney as his stepmother are touching but fairly marginal). Timothy Hutton, beautiful boy of a past era, appears as a meth expert, like a shrunken echo of Judd Hirsch’s therapist role in Hutton’s 1980 breakthrough, Ordinary People. In and out of treatment (the phrase “relapse is part of recovery” is not consoling), running to and from the family, Nic drives David nearly mad with bewildered anxiety. Their mutual love and guilt form an almost toxic double-helix. The confrontation in a San Francisco coffeehouse is among the greatest father-and-son scenes on film.

Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen maintains the potent core, with softening touches like Marin County vistas and sun-dappled shots of the woody-modern home. Some music inserts feel generic, though several rock tunes and “St. James Infirmary” (not Satchmo’s classic version) and Perry Como’s “Sunrise, Sunset” are effective. Carell, subtle even when he did broad comedies, has become a remarkably genuine, focused actor, and Chalamet proves again that Adonis looks need not muzzle talent. This is a family film about drug addiction, but anyone who calls it a soaper is blowing bubbles.

Tea With the Dames

The old chums often leave sentences unfinished, fall into silences, lurch into private giggles. Eileen Atkins, 84, and Judi Dench, 83, and Maggie Smith, 83, gather again at the lovely country home of Joan Plowright, who is blind, near-deaf and 88. There she lived with husband Lord Laurence Olivier, and her look-back love has flecks of ambivalence (“Yes, he was tricky,” chimes in Maggie). These elevated but unpretentious Dames of British acting seem beyond any direction from Roger Michell, though he made the great Austen film Persuasion (1995) and Peter  O’Toole’s last fine one, Venus (never mind Hyde Park on Hudson, with Bill Murray’s inane FDR). This chatty occasion is Tea With the Dames – Dench, Smith and Plowright once starred in Tea With Mussolini.

Most senior and limited, Joan presides with dowager dignity. Judi is still spunky and flint-eyed. Eileen preens that while she was never thought very pretty, she was “sexy” (clips prove it). Maggie is reliably funniest, sprinkling the dry wit that has given her the best senior career. Blithely she recalls Olivier slapping her hard during Othello (“It was the only time I saw stars at the National Theatre”), and admits never watching Downton Abbey, although “they sent me the box set.” Actor gossip sometimes hangs moss, some anecdotage is in its dotage, but the foursome is more than old crumpets. Clips include marvels, like teen Judi in a medieval mystery play, seen silent (she recalls her lines from 1951). By day’s end the weary Dames seem lame, drooping over their flutes of champagne. Inevitably, the final words are Shakespeare’s: “Our revels now are ended …”

SALAD (A List)

Maggie Smith’s Ten Best Film Vehicles

As listed by my taste: Gosford Park, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Othello, Harry Potter series, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Room With a View, Hot Millions, The Pumpkin Eater, A Private Function, The Lady in the Van.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though often disparaged as a remainder-shelf variant on Citizen Kane, Welles’s Mr. Arkadin has always had fans. Like me, and Cuba’s brilliant Guillermo Cabrera Infante. In 1956 he caught the virus of this breathless, tab-noir dream: “The film is like a gigantic cobweb in which Welles, a bearded spider, weaves his plot of intrigues, deceits and lies … a kaleidoscope of signs, like a brainteaser of clues. The truth rises up in fragments, is shattered, is recomposed, finally is discovered whole. And the labyrinth is the only guide to the mystery of art.” (From Cabrera Infante’s rich, strange book of critical pieces, A Twentieth Century Job. The movie is best seen in a splendid three-version set from Criterion.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Never at home in Hollywood, even during his smitten, mostly hidden romance with Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins fled in 1957 to star in Broadway’s Look Homeward, Angel: “His dreamy Eugene Gant ‘shattered the audience,’ said co-star Arthur Hill. Loving his Tony-nominated role, Tony was aware of ‘a certain boyish charm I’m cashing in on.’ His perpetually virginal nerves hung like tassels. ‘You were always aware,’ said Buck Henry, of Perkins as ‘the watcher, almost the voyeur of his own experience.” (From the Tony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Flea-circus maestro Mischa Auer gives investigator Robert Arden the big eye in Mr. Arkadin (Mercury,1955; director Orson Welles, photography Jean Bourgoin).

 

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