Daddy Issue Or Daddy's Issue?
Video overview
"Baby Boy" is not a good movie, but it is a good cry movie. Former Hollywood Golden Boy Shia LaBeouf wrote and acted, bringing her entanglement with her father to the big screen.
The film begins when adult Otis is diagnosed with a mental illness. He is both a big star and a troubled youth and is sent to a psychological clinic to study the source of PTSD. During the conversation with the counselor, Otis had to recall his past with his father James. James worked as a clown in the circus, raped Otis' mother and was arrested and jailed. After being released from prison, he learned that he had a son, and he was determined to be a good father. Otis was an early child star, and James got custody of him to act with his son on set. At this stage, his salary is the guardianship fee paid to him by Otis. He took 12-year-old Otis to live in a humble motel, allowing Otis to swear and smoke, but at the same time he had a violent and controlling desire for Otis. When Otis and his stepfather were close, James Humiliating stepfather in front of Otis. Similar frictions continued, and Otis finally made his request to James to make him a better father, and James beat Otis furiously. After calming down, James took Otis to his paradise: a small marijuana field on the side of the road. Although Otis wanted his father to build him a tree house, he smoked the first root of his life by the road. The marijuana still made him laugh. As an adult, Otis still agonizes over these pasts, and at the end of the film, he goes back to the motel, sits with James with clown paint on his face, and says, "I'm going to make a movie about you. Movie".
"Baby Boy" is the kind of story that is only supported by emotions and has no ups and downs in the plot. The structure is flat and rigid, and the camera and soundtrack are not restrained. The strong emotions that run through the film are enough to cover up the lack of dramatic conflict, and even "no change" from the beginning to the end achieves it. This emotional stillness is not dead silence, but is constituted by the confrontation between the two protagonists, and the audience. As an omniscient perspective, it must bear two kinds of pressures at the same time. If any other movie is a statement, "Baby Boy" is 90 minutes full of roars, and it's extremely infectious.
Born in 1986, LaBeouf, a child star, became popular in 2007 with "Transformers" and occupied the title of Hollywood's most watched male star at the end of the 2000s. At the same time, negative news also accompanied him, fighting, drunk driving, drug addiction, etc. Make him a famous bad boy. This is no different from Otis in the film, and it also makes the film form a contrast with reality. LaBeouf wrote the lines in his own hand to disassemble his own experience, bringing a natural credibility to the character. He played his father James in the film. Young Otis is played by Hollywood's hottest child star Noah Jupe. The subtlety of the casting story continued into filming, when actress FKA twigs, who played 12-year-old Otis' first kiss, and LaBeouf briefly dated. The young Otis, played by Lucas Hedges, is the narrator of the story. He appears more as a kind of intermission to separate the recollections, and also in the montage at the end and the young Otis. Alternating appearances, proving that ten years later he's still the boy tormented by the Daddy Issue.
Therefore, at the end of the film, the young Otis walked to James and resolved the conflict between father and son with an abrupt hug. It was a failure, as if the creator begged for mercy from the tacit audience: You know this is an adaptation of a real event, and you also know the truth There is no ending to speak of, this picture used as the ending is just an unfulfilled wish of LaBeouf himself. In reality, 20-year-old LaBeouf is personally ruining his future. In the film, 20-year-old Otis also failed to find an outlet for pain. The director no longer has authority over the film. When enough antecedents are accumulated, the audience will be able to judge whether the ending is reliable. Just as the Marvel movies brought us, when actor contracts, fan sentiments, and audience acceptance are all included in the scope of the film's setting, what an ending is written as is nothing but a compromise in a commercial context. Just like I scoffed at the ending of Avengers 4, the ending of Baby Boy is just a forced point to end it, and LaBeouf is still crying at 30 and retracing his difficult relationship with his father. Really reasonable ending. There is no ending.
Eternal Daddy Issue
At the beginning, the relationship between the child star and a supervisory father was very similar to "Shang Zhongyong", but as the plot developed, talent only accounted for a small part of the film. The whole film is very little about Otis' acting talent, and the description of the genius is far less piercing than the daily part (perhaps because the screenwriter is LaBeouf himself: the comfort brought by acting is not enough to calm down and deal with his father. pain to come). LaBeouf's creation needs to balance the perspectives of father and son. On the one hand, he experiences Otis' childhood, and on the other hand, he tries to understand James and complement the motivation for his father's performance. Therefore, "Baby Boy" is very full on the cross section of the father-son relationship. It does not explain the origin of this contradiction, but it shows the tension in its entirety.
Daddy Issue is a creative motif. As far back as the 8th century BC, Zeus and his dozens of descendants wrote the entire system of Greek mythology. The father-son relationship is ever-changing, it can be inheritance, it can be competition, it can be desired or it can be hated. One of the most popular and easiest to write at the moment is the "son seeking father's approval". In "The Social Network," Eduardo Saverin tells Mark Zuckerberg "you don't know what that means to my dad" when he goes live on Facebook, and when he loses his stake and becomes the laughing stock of business Say to Mark "My father doesn't want to see me anymore": he judges things by his father's will. In "Rocketman", Elton John, who became a superstar, went to his father to prove that he was enough to be his pride. He failed, so the popularity of millions of fans was not worth mentioning. In both cases, the "son" has become excellent in the secular sense, but the "son" still needs the recognition of the "father". This is because fatherly love is a natural need, absent when it is not available, and neither the love nor affirmation of others constitutes the original integrity of the "son".
This film presents the Daddy Issue from another angle: when a person becomes a father, how to deal with the relationship between being an independent individual and being a father. "Being a man" and "being a father" are contradictory to a certain extent. A person is often vulnerable, a person will be aware of the pressures he faces and put himself in a position to be challenged, a person knows what kind of weaknesses he has; and the father is a role to be admired, and the father will play a role in the life of the son. Playing a god for a while, he will be unconditionally trusted and relied upon. This mismatch of competencies and responsibilities creates frustration for the father, which in turn affects the son. In addition, another complication of the father-son relationship is the inheritance, "you have my blood on you" as the spell to create the Horcrux, the son becomes a double of the father, or the son finds excuses in the father. The new American drama "Defending Jacob", which aired in April, is an example. Prosecutor Andy's 14-year-old son Jacob becomes a murder suspect. Andy, as a father, has a stubborn to blind insistence on his son's innocence, and spares no effort to run for his son. And in his unknown past, Andy himself was the son of a murderer. If he wanted to prove that he was not like his father, he would never accept his son's atavism. In this series, Andy falls into a kind of double Daddy Issue. As a son, he has to get rid of the shadow. As a father, he is still getting rid of the same shadow. He needs to use his son's innocence to confirm his innocence. Although the slogan of "Defending Jacob" was that Chris Evans played his father for the first time, the first three episodes were completely dominated by images of Andy's father's arm tattoo, and the more Andy tried to get rid of his father's shadow, the more proof he was. A son looking for an exit (and most likely even influenced Jacob).
"Baby Boy" begins at the same time as a powerless father and a son seeking answers, and finally join forces in a tense dispute. It's rare that love isn't questioned in James's relationship with Otis. This is also the sad part of the film, the love is very hard, but the love is not correct. LaBeouf switched between father and son, completing a replay on his own. James himself was a terrible guy, with a criminal record, a marijuana, a bad temper, and he tried to be a good father, even though he didn't. It's not because James didn't work hard, there are so many fathers that people forget that it's a tough task. James knew better than anyone what his virtues were. He cried at the mutual aid meeting because he loved Otis so much, but he didn't do it well enough. But shame makes him unable to tolerate others' criticism of him, perhaps because when a person realizes his own inadequacies, this imperfection first tortures himself. Otis becomes an indirect victim of this torture, and as James suffers from this gap between ideal and reality, his pain is reflected in his attitude toward Otis. It is his love for Otis that makes him need to endure this pain, so to speak, Otis is a problem he can't solve, and he will behave worse when faced with a problem: a vicious circle. As a son, Otis first learned everything from his father. In the film, James was smoking on the toilet, and Otis immediately turned over to find a cigarette to smoke. This imitation is subconscious. Habits are not good or bad for a son, they are "the father does it" and "the father doesn't", the father is the son's instinctive way of dealing with problems. The meanness of the father is shame for the father, but not so bad for the son, because it comes from the father, so meanness also becomes a good meanness. The only person in the world who adores James is Otis.
When the psychiatrist wanted to cure Otis, the sad young man said: Pain is the only valuable thing my father gave me, and you want to take this away?
a vacuum
The last third of the film feels powerless. This incomprehension of love is not dramatic, but the confusion that everyone experiences. The reason why "Baby Boy" presents this issue so purely is due to the simplicity of its character settings. Except for James and Otis, everyone else is a foil, and no other characters are even introduced. Otis's mother flashed by on the phone to explain the emotional state of the family and Otis' relationship with the girl It was his way of handling his relationship with his father. The condensed narrative provides a near-vacuum environment for the father and son. The discussion of the father-son relationship is excavated from within, and no one else disturbs it, and similarly, no one else can relieve it.
"Pretty Boy" is also a film that explores the reasons for the failure of the father-son relationship. Father David retrieves the past in the process of helping his son Nick detoxify, and the memories seen from his side are all softened. But Nick's drug use must have something to do with him. When the father-son relationship goes wrong, there will never be an innocent father because everything is bestowed by the father. A type of perfect father is keen to be surprised when something goes wrong and to find out why, in fact they still believe that they are a good person and that they are not wrong so their son's sins cannot be blamed on them. They can't find a connection between their own perfection and their son's bad deeds, but the existence of a father-son relationship negates this.
"Baby Boy" is far more sincere in its perception of failure, and it spends enough space to describe the run-in between the two sides. Failure must come from the gap between ideal and reality. James regards Otis as a treasure. What he wants to do is to "love Otis like someone better than him", which is never possible. James is a stained cloth, and Otis is a piece of white paper. Their relationship will make James less dirty, and Otis will print the traces of his father.
Of course, the vacuum of father-son relationships is an excellent place to observe father-son disputes, but it is also the birthplace of a different kind of problem. When the father-son relationship becomes the only one in life, imitation and inheritance will fix the son in the position of the son, and cannot grow into an independent individual. The entire text of Daphne Du Maurier's "Dream of Life" is based on this background, in which the orphan Philippe adored his cousin Ambrose, who raised him like a father, and after his death "became so much like him that he was almost his own. Ghost", he unconsciously did what Ambrose did, even paranoid to get the love of his cousin Rachel. His love comes entirely from his filling of Ambrose's vacancy. This overly intimate relationship is the other extreme of the father-son relationship.
When thinking about parent-child relationships, it seems to me that only father-son relationships can be pure parent-child relationships, which is why Baby Boy is a wake-up call to everyone. The father-daughter, mother-daughter, and mother-son relationships all have to enter a gendered environment because of the participation of women. Women do not have the same standards of worldly success as men, and they cannot struggle with the same pain as the other party.
Noah Jupe's performance is impressive, and he gives the character of Otis a soul. As he sat by the pool with the blue lights draped over him, I thought, his tiny body was made of sadness. That vulnerability is gone in Lucas Hedges, a 20-year-old Otis, with his tough face and tough body, who looks like he can't stand the grief. I think the ending of the film is a perfunctory, Otis and James are separated by so many trivial pains, it is impossible to repair the relationship, and adults can only lock up these pains and stop thinking about them because of fatigue.
END
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