Beautiful Boy

Bjorn Andreson

In the ad campaign for Death in Venice, they promoted Bjorn Andreson as "The most beautiful boy in the world." The kid was sixteen and he couldn't have been happy about that. No teenage boy wants to be "beautiful". Maybe if they called him "The most ruggedly masculine boy in the world". Years later, he wasn't pleased when the feminist Germaine Greer used a photo of him without his permission on the cover of her pro-ephebophilia book, The Beautiful Boy.

Now we have Timothee Chalamet in the title role of Beautiful Boy based on the book by a bourgeois father with a drug addict for a son.

It's distributed by Amazon even though Chalamet helped sabotage Rainy Day in New York which Woody Allen directed for Amazon. Chalamet was one of the stars of that movie. He later announced he was on Ronan Farrow's side, denounced Allen and said he was sorry he was in it.

The title Beautiful Boy was from a John Lennon song, but I don't know what it's supposed to mean here.

I haven't seen it but here's something from a review in the New Republic:

...But turning a drug addict into a handsome young man with good skin and a ton of potential to waste—that’s easy. All you do is cast a pretty guy and let him cry onscreen in his mother’s arms, maybe give him some poetry to read aloud. (Nic does Bukowski, and I’m not even joking.) Sprinkle a little hope on him at the end and you’ve got yourself a tragic hero. 

That’s a problem, because being addicted to drugs in 2018 means bystanders filming you passed out in a dollar store. Of course there are plenty of beloved, middle-class people who have the struggles of Ben and Nic, and their suffering cannot be denied. But in defense of sheer reality, there are a lot more addicts who can’t afford dentistry and look unattractive because of it. These are people whom you might cross the street to avoid. Homelessness isn’t Timothée Chalamet draped handsomely across a diner; it’s contemptuous glances and shame. The women and men of Heroin(e) have universally bad skin and radiate that specific narcotic waxiness that comes from long-term abuse, because that’s what it looks like. In short, drug addiction is usually a story about poverty, inflected by race, and these movies are looking in the totally opposite direction.