HONEY BOY
****
Director: Alma Har’el
Screenwriter: Shia LaBeouf
Principal cast:
Shia LaBeouf
Lucas Hedges
Noah Jupe
FKA Twigs
Byron Bowers
Laura San Giacomo
Country: USA
Classification: MA15+
Runtime: 94 mins.
Australian release date: 27 February 2020.
This highly unusual film begins with a shot of Lucas Hedges looking down the barrel of the camera before the actor is violently jerked backwards into the rear of the frame on some sort of rope-and-pulley system and a clapperboard with the year ‘2005’ appears, snapping shut in the foreground. It’s an arresting image and it immediately has your mind asking, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And you keep asking that question for quite some time. Israeli-American documentary director Alma Har’el has chosen a difficult subject for her first dramatic feature, Honey Boy, working from an autobiographical script written by the actor Shia LaBeouf.
Hedges is Otis Lort, a fictionalised version of LaBeouf during his tear-away years, a troubled star battling his demons through the heavy use of booze, drugs and women. When he crashes his car leaving the set, he winds up in court-ordered rehab (Hedges has form playing this kind of stuff-up, see Ben Is Back, and he does it very well). As he reluctantly converses with his therapist, Dr. Moreno (Laura San Giacomo), we start to understand what has brought him to this low-point in what should be a glittering career. Diagnosed with PTSD, he is asked to write about his childhood and we flashback to 1995, when Lort, aka LaBeouf, was a successful child-star (an amazingly mature performance by young Noah Jupe), living in a run-down motel with his father James (played by LaBeouf himself), who called him ‘Honey Boy’. Yes, Shia LaBeouf is acting as his very own dead-beat dad, a man who treated his boyhood-self appallingly and mentally abused him. And this is the screenplay that the actor wrote as therapy when he really was undergoing treatment for PTSD. How meta and what a construct!
In 1995, LaBeouf’s father was a retired rodeo clown, an alcoholic - “You come from a line of alcoholics” - who’d been on the wagon for four years but plainly wasn’t real happy about it. He sticks around because he’s employed as his son’s minder and because, in his distorted mind, he’s teaching the boy how to be strong. The only sweetness in Honey Boy’s life comes from the shy girl who lives across the way (FKA Twigs). We see all this as the story flashes back and forth between the two time periods: Otis at 12 in the motel and Otis at 22 in rehab. As this process of remembering the past begins to have a beneficial impact on his present, Otis starts to find a way to deal with his fractured upbringing but he fights to the very last because, he tells the doctor, “All my father gave me was pain and now you want to take that away from me!”
If Honey Boy sounds like a therapy session, it’s because it is awfully close to one, as was the process of making it. Cinematographer Natasha Braier explained that working with LaBeouf kept her on her toes because his modus operandi was “… really channelling, more than acting, and it’s being in the skin of the person that created the biggest wounds in his childhood, that are still hurting a lot and make him who he is. It’s like a very sophisticated type of therapy that costs $3.5 million [the movie’s budget].” It also meant that she often had to capture his performance in one take; he would be so emotionally exhausted after certain parts that the director felt she couldn’t ask him to go through it again.
The resulting work is fascinating, a unique combination of cinema, therapy and art. Stick with it after your initial head-scratching; Honey Boy will reward you with one of the most extraordinary performances, and screenplays, you’ll see in the cinema this year.
Screenwriter: Shia LaBeouf
Principal cast:
Shia LaBeouf
Lucas Hedges
Noah Jupe
FKA Twigs
Byron Bowers
Laura San Giacomo
Country: USA
Classification: MA15+
Runtime: 94 mins.
Australian release date: 27 February 2020.
This highly unusual film begins with a shot of Lucas Hedges looking down the barrel of the camera before the actor is violently jerked backwards into the rear of the frame on some sort of rope-and-pulley system and a clapperboard with the year ‘2005’ appears, snapping shut in the foreground. It’s an arresting image and it immediately has your mind asking, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And you keep asking that question for quite some time. Israeli-American documentary director Alma Har’el has chosen a difficult subject for her first dramatic feature, Honey Boy, working from an autobiographical script written by the actor Shia LaBeouf.
Hedges is Otis Lort, a fictionalised version of LaBeouf during his tear-away years, a troubled star battling his demons through the heavy use of booze, drugs and women. When he crashes his car leaving the set, he winds up in court-ordered rehab (Hedges has form playing this kind of stuff-up, see Ben Is Back, and he does it very well). As he reluctantly converses with his therapist, Dr. Moreno (Laura San Giacomo), we start to understand what has brought him to this low-point in what should be a glittering career. Diagnosed with PTSD, he is asked to write about his childhood and we flashback to 1995, when Lort, aka LaBeouf, was a successful child-star (an amazingly mature performance by young Noah Jupe), living in a run-down motel with his father James (played by LaBeouf himself), who called him ‘Honey Boy’. Yes, Shia LaBeouf is acting as his very own dead-beat dad, a man who treated his boyhood-self appallingly and mentally abused him. And this is the screenplay that the actor wrote as therapy when he really was undergoing treatment for PTSD. How meta and what a construct!
In 1995, LaBeouf’s father was a retired rodeo clown, an alcoholic - “You come from a line of alcoholics” - who’d been on the wagon for four years but plainly wasn’t real happy about it. He sticks around because he’s employed as his son’s minder and because, in his distorted mind, he’s teaching the boy how to be strong. The only sweetness in Honey Boy’s life comes from the shy girl who lives across the way (FKA Twigs). We see all this as the story flashes back and forth between the two time periods: Otis at 12 in the motel and Otis at 22 in rehab. As this process of remembering the past begins to have a beneficial impact on his present, Otis starts to find a way to deal with his fractured upbringing but he fights to the very last because, he tells the doctor, “All my father gave me was pain and now you want to take that away from me!”
If Honey Boy sounds like a therapy session, it’s because it is awfully close to one, as was the process of making it. Cinematographer Natasha Braier explained that working with LaBeouf kept her on her toes because his modus operandi was “… really channelling, more than acting, and it’s being in the skin of the person that created the biggest wounds in his childhood, that are still hurting a lot and make him who he is. It’s like a very sophisticated type of therapy that costs $3.5 million [the movie’s budget].” It also meant that she often had to capture his performance in one take; he would be so emotionally exhausted after certain parts that the director felt she couldn’t ask him to go through it again.
The resulting work is fascinating, a unique combination of cinema, therapy and art. Stick with it after your initial head-scratching; Honey Boy will reward you with one of the most extraordinary performances, and screenplays, you’ll see in the cinema this year.