Beach Rats is an absolute disaster, but it is one that shows in stark relief why some detached art films work and why some don’t. The answer seems to be quite simple, story and character. Beach Rats does its best to be an incredibly detached art film about the life of a young gay man, slowly attempting to come to terms with his sexuality, but it ultimately lacks anything of substance. There’s a frustrating boredom to the work as it expands into nothingness. The story goes nowhere, the character goes nowhere. He starts the same man and ends the same man. The events seem to plod on and the experience is only that of mild sensory and auditory impacts. The character at the center of this film may have trouble gaining his identity, but the movie that he is at the center of doesn’t have one. If there is some meat to be torn from the bones of Beach Rats it is the way that the camera observes the characters. Frankie (Harris Dickinson) is a young man, and at that, he is an almost hyper-masculine id of a man. He smokes and shaves his head, and is disrespectful and struggles with that, but most of all he lends what seems to be his view of the world to the film around him. In Beach Rats, everyone is objectified meaning that both men and women are viewed as objects. The tonal structure of Beach Rats seems crafted around how characters that objectify each other interact. Objectification of a human being has a price, though. It forces the objectifier to see the other as less than a person, separating the objectifier from the world. That’s how Beach Rats often feels. Separated from the rest of the world. While the events should play like a fever dream, the lack of character and the structure of scenes leave it as just a fever, a long, disjointed fever, that not even a cast and director throwing everything into the experience could reconcile. If this review turns out short, it is because like a fading picture, Beach Rats sits there, a tasteless reverie of emotion. This looked a whole lot better than it actually is, and consider me thoroughly disappointed. I give Beach Rats a 4 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |