I love a good story about drug or alcohol addiction. And I love great actors who constantly bring it in their roles. So I had super high expectations for Felix Van Groeningen Beautiful Boy, the true story of the relationship between an 18-year-old son (Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name, Hostiles) battling drugs and his father (Steve Carell – Foxcatcher, Battle of the Sexes) who is willing to do anything to fix the problem, but is unsuccessful in all of his attempts. The trailer definitely made it seem like my type of movie. I should have been wary of the 67% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was encouraged by the 77% audience score. But as I watched this from the lens of a critic, I kept circling back to the same question. If you had these actors in place, you could have done hundreds, even thousands, of different stories about addiction. So why did they pick this story? It wasn’t anything special. It lacked vision. Van Groeningen, as a novice director, was completely in over his head, and he wasted the performance of both of its leads by telling a story of a story that wasn’t unique, was stale in its delivery, and left us feeling unattached to its characters. In a word, Beautiful Boy  underwhelmed.
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