Beautiful Boy is a small film about a tragedy too big to grasp. Unlike Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which explored the events leading up to and including a high school shooting, director Shawn Ku’s feature debut deals with the fallout experienced by Kate and Bill Carroll (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen), the parents of a teenager who opens fire on his college classmates and then kills himself. It is simple, predictable, and mostly effective.
Rather than shattering the couple, the horrific event only deepens the existing rift between them — they were already on the brink of divorce and had lost the ability to communicate with their alienated son. This approach makes for a drama more despairing than devastating. Because their dead son is a killer and not an innocent victim, the Carrolls’ grieving is heavily laden with guilt, blame, and agonizing questions about where they went wrong. The Carrolls seek little help (counseling is not even mentioned until very late in the film, and then only in passing), but it quickly becomes clear that Kate is far better equipped to deal with the tragedy than Bill is. The expected story elements are duly ticked off: media circus, curious coworkers and neighbors, strained relationships with relatives, the search for clues to the killer’s mindset in his videos and short stories.
Ku (who also cowrote, with Michael Armbruster) relies on the subject matter’s built-in emotional impact and provides few revelations. He rarely reaches for big drama, which may be for the best, as his film tends to devolve into shouting matches when he does. (These arguments lack the focused power of a similar scene from Todd Field’s In the Bedroom.) Instead, Ku’s strength lies in observation of the little details — cart traffic in a supermarket, a remark about someone’s shirt “getting a little ripe” — that make up the ordinary world these people lived in before tragedy struck and must continue living in afterwards.
Ku overdoes the jittery handheld camera and jarring cuts but gets natural, nuanced performances from his leads. Sheen, so adept at a wide variety of roles, does good work as an American Everyman. But the real star is Bello, who will get an Oscar nomination soon (possibly for this) and could win someday, if she ever scores the right role in the right movie. Here she adds another strong, resilient woman to her long resume of outstanding performances in films that have been good, middling, or awful, but never great. She underplays one of Beautiful Boy’s most obvious twists so beautifully it ends up as one of the film’s best scenes. The standouts among the supporting cast are Alan Tudyk as Bello’s compassionate brother and Meat Loaf Aday, continuing his surprising second career as a dramatic actor, as a suspicious motel manager. Everyone, in fact, is good in this solid, unsurprising film that never quite peaks.
