Beautiful Boy, starring Maria Bello and Michael Sheen

Beautiful Boy is a film that has a lot of promise and a point of view we don't often get to see. A painful, depressing story of a married couple, Bill(Michael Sheen) and Kate(Maria Bello), lost in the midst of some terrible emotional hurt that has clearly derailed their marriage. It isn't long before we find out what it was that blew up their happy home, and it's something far worse than a simple infidelity. Their son Sam, a solemn and depressed college student, has committed a massacre at his school, ultimately killing himself at the end. Don't expect a lot of laughs in this one, folks. Instead you might want to bring a few buckets for all the tears....if you can bear it long enough.

The story was co-written and directed by Shawn Ku, who got the inspiration due to his family's close connection to a victim of the Virginia Tech massacre. It's clear his focus is on extracting from and then heaping on as much misery as possible onto his actors. Bill and Kate are stuck in a claustrophobic world after the disaster. Partly it's of their own making as they torture themselves with questions like "What did we do wrong"? and "Should we have seen it coming"? Their situation isn't helped by the army of press folks staged outside their door, or the glances from strangers on the street. The tension mounts as they try to escape by staying with Kate's family. The pressure begins to break their marriage apart, yet due to the circumstances they're compelled to stay together until it all blows over.

The level of anguish will remind some of Rabbit Hole, and so will the raw emotions and anger that bubbles up between husband and wife.  But where that film fails to connect on any sort of emotional level, so does Beautiful Boy suffer from the same affliction. There's not an ounce of hope in the entire film, making this one dour episode to sit through. I applaud the performances by Bello and Sheen, who must've plumbed some real depths to pull reach such lows, but there has to be a balance. Heaping so much tragedy constantly and consistently dulls the senses until it's hard to care. We don't get to see enough of Bill and Kate's happiness to get a proper perspective. It's almost as if Ku figured that showing so much grief is a welcome substitute for proper storytelling. It's not, and the whole thing has the feel of a college acting workshop.