CINEMA NOW: "Beautiful Boy" - The sins of the son

Maria Bello and Moon Bloodgood

Starring Maria Bello and Michael Sheen. Directed by Shawn Ku. 100 minutes. Opening Friday at the Cumberland. 14A


Like a husband furtively surfing porn while his wife sleeps, Bill (Michael Sheen) visits apartment rental websites while wife Kate (Maria Bello) isn’t around to catch him. They may lead separate lives inside their comfy suburban home, but Kate is still convinced a family vacation along with 18-year-old college student son Sammy (Kyle Gallner) could heal long-festering wounds and stop a looming split. That Bill and Kate don’t talk about what’s happening between them seems to be a long-established pattern.

They could have gone on like this forever — and perhaps would have — until the shattering news of a mass shooting by a sniper at Sammy’s college. Even as his parents agonize over whether their son was a victim, police tell them Sammy was the instigator of the rampage that ended with him taking his own life.

What follows in Beautiful Boy is an examination of parental love cloaked in guilt, questioning and self-recrimination, a very different view of these tragedies that have been used to spark dramas in the past (Polytechnique, Elephant). Using an often-unsteady handheld camera to give the film an air of documentary and a sense of intimacy, writer-director Shawn Ku gives us the shooter’s parents’ view of the tragedy and it is just as devastating as anything we can imagine among victims’ families.

First-time feature director Ku, who had a previous career as a dancer and choreographer, shows skill with this debut, which earned the TIFF 2010 International Critics’ Award/FIPRESCI Discovery Award last September. It’s not without some missteps, but he’s got good instincts and he stays true to them.

Besides a spare, lone piano, the other movie score comes from the ever-present TV with its screeching headlines about the murders and armchair critics decrying flawed parenting as the source of Sammy’s violent act. The commentary is a constant reminder for Bill and Kate, as they go through the process of burying and mourning their son. The couple move around in familiar yet bruised intimacy. The simple act of unzipping a dress seems painful.

To avoid reporters that surround their house they stay with Kate’s brother, Eric (Alan Tudyk) and his wife, Trish (Moon Bloodgood). Everyone has an opinion about Sammy, even the motel clerk (Meat Loaf) who checks in Bill and Kate one night when they need respite from family tensions.

Sheen, speaking in an unfamiliar-sounding flat American accent, and Bello are superb in their roles. He’s confused and friendless and fears he’s to blame for Sammy’s fatal flaws. Work is a place where people stare and whisper. Kate, meanwhile, is desperate to justify a mother’s love, yet is surrounded by betrayal.

Ku uses a cheap roadside motel room as a battleground and sanctuary for the couple in an exhausting scene that swings from tenderness to emotional fury and, finally, acceptance. Bill and Kate get half-drunk on Scotch sipped from plastic cups and share a vending machine dinner, their laughter giving hints of what they once had together made more poignant by the realization that it’s gone forever. The proceedings are raw — Michael’s words are as devastating as any a father has said about his son — but so honest and true they will seem familiar, even if the depth of their sorrow and pain isn’t.

While the world questions Bill and Kate as parents, they find it impossible not to do the same about themselves. If their reviled son didn’t come from them, then neither did their beautiful boy.




Maria Bello finds beauty in script

For Maria Bello, “Beautiful Boy” was a labor of love.


“I knew that I had to do it,” she said about the drama that considers the fallout for the parents of a quiet teen who takes a gun to his university, slaughters fellow students and then kills himself.

His agonized parents Kate (Bello) and Bill (Michael Sheen) face the aftermath hiding from the media and heap blame on each other.

“Michael and I like to joke that we had to pay to do this movie,” Bello, 44, said, “because we did it on no budget in downtown L.A. in 15 days.”

Did Bello worry the subject might be a turnoff?

“No, I never really think like that,” she said.

“In my whole career, you’ve seen I’ve done really different sorts of roles. I read a script and I’m moved by it — it makes me laugh or makes me feel something — and then I want to do it.

“I can never think about who’s going to see it or how is it going to turn out because you never know. That’s not up to me. The only thing I can do is do the best work I can do and then, who knows?”

With “Beautiful Boy,” Bello read the script and discovered “it’s really a love story about these two people. I mean, the shooting is the central tragedy that changes their lives.

“But in a way these are two disparate people that have been in a relationship for a long time who forget who they are. And they forget each other. They stop being honest with themselves.

“Which,” added the single actress, “from hearing friends in long-term relationships, happens sometimes. So even though it’s a difficult subject matter, I thought it was so incredibly beautiful.”

This fall she tackles an even heavier hurdle: comparisons with Helen Mirren as the star of the American TV version of “Prime Suspect,” the English detective series of 20 years ago.

“It’s quite different from the British version. The character is quite different, as well. You get to see this woman as a full person, at home, with her father. It’s not only a procedural,” she said.



Maria Bello and Moon Bloodgood just might be centre of attention in Beautiful Boy movie by director Shawn Ku. Highly dramatic movie follows the touching and heart rending manner in which a couple deals with the consequences of a tragic event where their teenage son carried out a massacre in high school and committing suicide later. Gripping story centers how that try to cope with media gaze while coming into terms with their personal problems.


Beautiful Boy movie star Maria Bello sure is becoming one of highly talented actresses among her contemporaries and having two Golden Globe nominations under her belt and she has appeared in a number of high flying projects making her acting profile to appear as impressive and interesting. Exotically beautiful actress Moon Bloodgood is getting a quite of a chance to work in this promising movie and this might provide her with a breakthrough role as well.

Capturing a heart warming drama that takes a deep look into tragic events and the impact it has on relationships upcoming Beautiful Boy movie will takes onlookers on a emotional ride which will be a different kind of a sensation to be felt in the most intimate manner.