Honey Boy (Alma Har’el, 2019)

[The Narrator Returns]

Lucas Hedges will play Even Stevens-era Shia LaBeouf, opposite Shia LaBeouf as his father

[MoonlitKnight]

Should this be surprising? I'm not sure anymore... :-s

[Big Ben]

The weird thing is is that Shia landed on his feet after being a child star in Even Stevens with things like Transformers (Yes the films are awful but Michael Bay pays well.) and then he apparently through his own volition started taking more and more obscure roles. I realize people want to be challenged but going from Bay to von Trier is....well I don't think it needs to be spelled out.

[knives]

Usually the route is the other way.

[domino harvey]

Hedges' involvement is the only thing giving me hope-- his agents are good and he could get any movie he wanted right now, so there must be something here beyond the gimmick

[therewillbeblus]

After sitting through a run of films at a festival that each happened to explore family dynamics and events filtered through subjective perspective and memory, here we get the inverse of Waves’ eclectic canvas of experience in favor of Shia LaBeouf’s personalized skewed memories of processing his own trauma. It’s an interesting experiment that mostly works thanks to some inspired direction and the performances. LaBeouf’s own script is at times too overwritten and muffled for the final product to fully rise above the weight of his own manic attachment to certain fixations. It’s LaBeouf’s performance though, as his own father, that makes the film as good as it is. He approaches the role with an unexpectedly layered intensity that is undeniably courageous and fearless. I’m not sure how therapeutic or cathartic an exercise this was, or if it had more of a masochistic effect, and going by LaBeouf‘s track record of various weird rehabilitations and performance art, one can never be sure if he’s even sure himself whether he’s searching for growth or self-destruction, or both, out of his actions (or reactions). Still, this is his best performance, one of the best of the year, and one that should earn him recognition if there is any justice come awards season.