After a campus murder-suicide spree, Kate and Bill Carroll call their son Sammy to make sure he’s all right. Suddenly there’s a knock on the door. Not only has Sammy died. He was the shooter. Director Shawn Ku’s searing emotional drama Beautiful Boy is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.
Produced after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, Beautiful Boy captures what films so rarely do: a change of heart. Maria Bello and Michael Sheen fascinate as agonized parents forced to open their hearts to each other just to survive.
As the film opens, Kate and Bill sleep in separate beds. Bill wants to move to his own apartment and start over. Kate tries to reunite the family one last time by proposing a Miami vacation.
They stayed together for Sammy’s sake. When he calls them for the last time, Sammy sounds distant and withdrawn. Bill hangs up and goes to bed. Kate persists, asking the 18-year-old how he is. As he rambles on about snowflakes, she listens. Freshman year is hard for everyone, Kate reassures him. The boy has always been different, quiet and sensitive.
Bello (A History of Violence, and now Detective Jane Timoney in television’s Prime Suspect) is stunning. Her evolution as an actor is clear as she balances rage, honesty and heartbreak. She unleashes a firestorm of denial, grief and coping.
Sheen (the London stage veteran who played David Frost in Frost/Nixon) is excellent as a man of long-suppressed emotions who hardly knows himself. Bill moves like a robot each day between home and office. Already an emotional fugitive, he flees further within after the massacre.
Kyle Gallner (CSI: NY; A Nightmare on Elm Street) perfectly captures depressed, troubled Sammy. His eyes say so much more than he does. Television news reports reveal that he slayed 21 before killing himself.
Besieged by reporters, the devastated couple hides in their own home before taking refuge with Kate’s brother Eric (Alan Tudyk) and his wife Trish (Moon Bloodgood). Trish’s alarmed, well-meaning questions only intensify their pain.
Healing begins. As each moment passes, even mundane chores become accomplishments. Michael Fimognari creates intimacy and a dream-like aesthetic with a hand-held camera. Ku wrote the screenplay with Michael Armbruster.
Beautiful Boy is an autopsy of a marriage. Kate and Bill grow closer and careen apart. They lash out at themselves and each other. They collapse in exhaustion.
Perfectionist Kate is a proofreader. She edits the couple’s media statement, allowing Bill to face a horde of reporters himself. Kate also inspires an opportunistic young novelist Cooper (Austin Nichols).
Kate is relentless with herself and everyone around her. Trish gets upset when her house guest begins “fixing” their home and reading bedtime stories to their little boy. The Carrolls move to a motel.
Bill’s pain is primal. He tells his boss (Bruce French) that he has no friends. Meanwhile Kate rifles through Sammy’s bedroom. She reads his school papers. Grasping for answers, Kate and Bill are left with uncertainty.
Everyone is touched in some way by the incident. Even a motel clerk (Meat Loaf Aday) learns compassion when the vilified mother and father seek refuge. They become real to him.
“I don’t believe in monsters,” Ku says on the film’s website. Beautiful Boy not only made me empathize with the parents. It reminded me that I am my brother’s keeper.
If you like Beautiful Boy, you might enjoy: Rabbit Hole; Blue Valentine.
Beautiful Boy 2010 / R (language, sexual situation) / 1 hour, 40 min
Cast Overview: Michael Sheen, Maria Bello, Alan Tudyk, Moon Bloodgood, Kyle Gallner, Austin Nichols, Meat Loaf Aday
Director: Shawn Ku
Genre: Drama
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