Shia LaBeouf. Actor. Performance artist. Meme in human form.
Multidisciplinary plagiarist. Jack of all trades, master of none, not even
himself. The man I’ve been calling ‘Shia LaBullshitArtist’ for as long as this
blog has existed, out of respect for Daniel Clowes, the Anomalies crew, and
pretty much everyone else Shia has ripped off over the course of his career. Is
it clear enough yet that I don’t exactly have the highest opinion of this guy
as a creative?
Or, at least, I didn’t use to. Between his place as the lead
actor in the earlier Michael Bay Transformers movies, the way Hollywood kept
trying to push for him as the next big thing with little success, and how much
he basically imploded over the course of the 2010’s, he’s pretty much secured his place
as everyone’s favourite punching bag. But after seeing him in The Peanut Butter Falcon, in a performance so fucking resonant that articulating my gratitude
resulted in some of my best critical work to date, I’m more willing than ever
to give the guy his fair due. And once I get into the contents of his latest,
hopefully you’ll see why.
Written up by Shia during rehab as a bit of art therapy,
this is basically a dramatisation of Shia’s childhood and his relationship with
his father, a rodeo clown played by Shia himself, with Noah Jupe and Lucas
Hedges as his fictionalised younger and older selves respectively. It’s a
portrait of parental abuse and trauma that cuts pretty fucking deep, with Shia
and Noah nailing every single moment they share on-screen. The father is shown
as a highly unsavoury character, an ‘egomaniac with an inferiority complex’
that echoes the man Shia would become later on (it even takes cues from his
more publicized altercations with the law), and a product of the same tradition
of cruelty that made his son such a basket case.
Hedges as the damaged older man, trying to come to terms
with his own damage, echoes his work in Ben Is Back and Boy Erased in how raw
it gets, but holy shit, Noah Jupe manages to bowl right over him with his own
performance as the younger child actor. As someone who regularly likes pointing
out up-and-coming child actors in these reviews, seeing Noah basically playing
the responsible adult of the two is hard to sit through in the best way
possible. It’s precocious without being precious, coming across more like a
forced survival tactic in the face of how fucked-up his relationship with his
father is.
Hell, on the aforementioned note of the similarities between
father and son, the way the father is described as taking credit for the work
of others, to the point of plagiarising his AA confessions… it feels like
Shia’s finally taking responsibility for his own artistic theft.
But with how legendarily narcissistic Shia’s public persona
is, all of this easily could have fallen into self-flagellation for profit;
like the shit Mel Gibson is best known for. However, the depiction we get of
his upbringing and the effect it had on him isn’t rose-tinted. Nor is it
particularly blood-thirsty, like he wanted a platform to blast his shitty
father. Instead, the way he and debut director Alma Har’el treat the script
shows a level of maturity and lucidity that, to be brutally honest, I never
would have guessed Shia was capable of.
He’s not out for vengeance; he wants to heal his own wounds
and better understand the person who inflicted them. It transcends the
unfortunately self-serving tone of works like Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life and
The Way Back, as the catharsis and revelation here go beyond what they mean for
the persons on-screen and turn into genuine engagement.
Whether it’s Noah trying to enjoy the performance art he
loves so much, Lucas embodying the complexities of this kind of strained
father-son relationship, or Shia metatextually putting himself in his abuser’s
shoes, this film gave me a lot of consistently dour feels, and it earned every
tear it got from me. It may not entirely excuse how bonkers Shia LaBeouf’s career has
been of late… but it’s given me enough understanding of his damage to make me want to
give the guy less of a hard time in future.
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