Shia LeBeouf Is No Longer Fucking Around
The former child actor gets personal in his screen writing debut.
There’s something about shitty coffee, you know, like the hotel kind that you make in your room. Or the giant tub of pre-ground that probably has some amount of cardboard in it. Or the kind that, if I’m feeling brave, I might pour myself a cup of at the Jiffy Lube while my oil gets changed. A couple sips into a cup of coffee like that, I start to feel a sense of possibility, like I can’t be held back. Maybe it’s the caffeine, gradually seeping into the blood vessels under my tongue. But I think it’s more the reminder that all the creature comforts we cushion our world with–the phone camera with three lenses, the futuristic cotton-blend sweatshirt that feels like it’s woven with the hairs from the head of baby Jesus, the Instant Pots and the Theraguns, and yes, the gourmet coffee, hand ground and brewed in a glass beaker–aren’t necessary to be successful or fulfilled or self actualized or happy. Shitty coffee tastes like freedom from the bondage of consumerism.
Honey Boy has a similar effect. It foregoes the typical polish and overwhelming computerized visuals of most modern Hollywood flicks, instead leaning on the characters. Long, uncut scenes force the viewer to marinate in the psychologically fraught experiences of Otis (Honey Boy) and James (his father). There are no big landscapes, epic war scenes, space battles, or crowded shots in public that require an army of extras. Most of the scenes take place in one of three settings. The whole movie was made for 3.5 Million dollars. It’s not gourmet.
In minimizing the fluff, the characters are pulled more sharply into focus. Whether the movie works depends on the characters’ ability to lull you into their world and transfer their mental anguish onto you. It doesn’t lean on explosions or technicolor animation, although it did manage to scare the shit out of me with a jump cut of a squawking chicken. But it’s as a character study that this movie succeeds or fails.
America is used to antiheroes by now but Shia LeBeouf, the films writer, and lead actor, takes a side door approach to unveiling the multitudes of Honey Boy’s father, James (played by LeBeouf and based on LeBeouf’s actual father). Instead of a good guy who breaks bad, or a moral guy who, turns out, has some significant faults, Otis’ dad, in his oversized clown glasses, is an asshole from the start. Only over time do we start to understand that he’s not entirely virtueless and that there’s real trauma underlying his cruelty. He’s not an anti-hero because he’s not a hero. He’s a villain with texture.
His son, Otis, is the story’s hero and chief victim. His life’s arc serves as a commentary on acting, trauma and mental illness and is based on LeBeouf’s own life. It also serves, tangentially, as a critique of America’s criminal justice system and mental health treatment facilities. Above all, though, it begs the question: how biographically accurate is this movie?
The crescendo of Honey Boy is a lengthy montage featuring a motorcycle, improvisational mime acting, strippers, possible statutory rape and free basing cocaine. It’s a visual treat with a psychedelic tint that’s appropriately grandiose. In its aftermath we see a father and his 12-year-old son, both smoking cigarettes in the morning light of a one-room trailer and marinating on their violently dysfunctional relationship. These ten minutes crystalize the Honey Boy experience.
It’s hard to tell how much of this movie’s grip comes from waiting for LeBeouf, who’s never written and acted in his own movie before and who holds a curious slice of the cultural consciousness, to either fall on his face or land on his feet — a tension that’s amplified because of the films highly personal subject matter. Teasing apart the LeBeouf meta-narrative from the objective quality of the on-screen product is impossible. Whether he stuck the landing or face planted is up to you, but he reminded us that you don’t need a quarter billion dollars to make 96 minutes of thought provoking film. The cheap version will do just fine, thank you.
