We saw Beast at Menlo Park’s Guild Theater. It’s a beautiful single-screen movie house in a really charming part of town. First time at that theater. First time in a while that it’s hit 100 degrees outside. A good Memorial Day Weekend movie day.
Structural Symmetry. Beast is scaffolded by symmetrical images, words, and actions. The repetition of the question, “Can you keep a secret?” by Cliff and then Pascal. Moll’s brilliant monologue about killer whales (“when kept in captivity, they go deaf and dumb”) corresponds with the absence of sound in the final scene. The shooting of the rabbit echoes the shooting of the gun at Pascal’s entrance, which sets up a parallel with the action after the car accident. The glass in Moll’s hands mirrors the glass on the road. Beast uses callbacks as a way of delineating chapters and letting off steam: Moll’s choir singing in the opening scene returns at the garden party and again in the interrogation. Even the nature of that first song is duplicative: Moll’s mother interrupts the song to tell Moll to start over and try harder. Moll’s job sets a steady beat to her life: the first time, the day after she’s been rescued by Pascal, and he’s there to see her when she returns from work and he gives her a birthday present; again when she’s learned new information about him, and the relationship seems to have cooled; again when she throws up while thinking about the photographs she’s seen during the interrogation. The way she responds to the detective in the dark room echoes the way she’s forced to apologize to her niece for being selfish and a liar after she’s caught meeting Pascal for a date. Even the yellow dress from her birthday has a meaningful callback. Symmetry in Beast seems to be an organizing principle of action. Things happen because they echo the past. Characters say what they say because it rhymes with something someone else has told Moll, and in some ways, this might be a too tidy for some. I like the tightness of this kind of logic.
An Unreliable Narrator. Moll’s monologue sets the stage for one of my favorite kinds of storytellers, the unreliable narrator. So much of her action is us watching her form a character, her attempt at approximating what a human being would feel or do in a certain circumstance: her forced smile at the party; the way she puts on a smile when she dresses up in the mirror; the way her face snaps back to neutral after the business with the rabbit and Pascal asks, “Are you OK?”; later, when she’s in white at the restaurant; even in the car on the road with Pascal.
Fast-paced editing assists in intensifying the tension of Moll’s ambiguous characterization. Quick cuts keep the audience on edge, trying to piece together what has happened in the intervening moments: jumping from her bloody wrist during an early self-harm scene straight to her out on the shore of Jersey, drinking at a club; from her giving a rebellious toast at the country club to her placing books on a shelf and unpacking her clothes into a drawer; her night terrors; the shifting explanation of her violent childhood incident, as interpreted by her sister, then by Moll at the bar, again at the mall shop, and at the seaside restaurant.
The dream sequences are nice examples of the intersection between structural scaffolding and unreliable narration.
False Endings. Wife brought up this concept of “false endings,” adapted from one of our favorite literary theorists, Northrop Frye, who talks about the way that stories resemble the seasons of the year. Frye says something like comedies will begin in a summer, build stakes in a fall sequence, jeopardize everything in a winter, and end in a spring sequence with renewal and rebirth. Wife felt that Beast had a series of false endings (winter sequences), and each one was worse than the one that came before. She says it was a little exhausting to feel that the movie was constantly on the verge of ending, that it whipsawed so often how we’re supposed to feel that it made the final act unsatisfying and poorly paced.
I thought the pace and frenetic nature of the third act was one of the things that marked this movie as ambitious. Its morals are messy and complicated. Moll and Pascal’s romance feels liberating and gallant at first and then when Cliff comes along to present his evidence, and Pascal explains himself, their first “I love you” suddenly feels dangerous and a little subversive. Even as they exit the seaside restaurant, there’s the sense that the prim and proper progressive feminism of #MeToo could dissolve away in the face of such honest, passionate love. Moll at the funeral and the confrontation with church goers feels unhinged and threatens to tumble out of the centrifugal force that the tight structural symmetry of the film has created. To strain the physics metaphors, the momentum of the third act, which Wife sees as being unsatisfying and less polished (maybe less disciplined?) is propelled by its opposition to the forces of narrative symmetry.
Beast is filled with beautiful tableaus. My favorite was Moll on the couch covered in dirt from the night before, her legs splayed out, dress askew, fingers miming the previous night.
The Beasts. Cliff’s creepy characterization is sketched out very nicely in three parts: at the birthday, as he nervously pins his gift on Moll’s dress; when he’s in the car with her and he breaks a rule to counsel her about her relationship; and, when he brings her good news and Moll asks him to keep the door open. Moll’s relationship with her mother is similarly ominous, dreadfully ambiguous. “They tried to beat the bad out of me,” Moll explains to Pascal at a bar with a rueful smile on their first date. The catty one-upmanship of Moll’s sister. The mother’s subtle favoritism of Moll’s mess of a brother. Speaking of family dynamics, the descriptive reveal of the father’s condition is genius in its subtlety. For the first ten minutes or so, I wasn’t sure he was even real (maybe just a polite excuse everyone in the family uses?), and when he appears, his condition is intimated very gently over time, from the repeated question about the game at lunch, to the late night conversation, to the way his champagne flute trembles ever so much in his hand at the dinner party.
The storytelling is patient with things like Moll’s father in a way that I find extremely satisfying and norm-breaking. The way Pascal’s name is mentioned only in his third introduction at dinner is so Dickensian in its disciplined withholding.
The class issues in Beast are kind of timeless: when Moll’s invitation on Saturday turns out to be a job offer, or the panoply of different meal scenes. All the meal scenes are charged with social critique: Pascal’s matter of fact, “You don’t have to apologize on your brother’s behalf”; or Moll’s sister’s unwillingness to vouch for Pascal at the country club and Moll’s toast, “For all that you have done to me, I forgive you”; the subtle savagery of the Moll’s mother’s warning, “The rules don’t change just because someone’s taken interest. Maybe I’ve been too soft on you.” Beast‘s interest in the most privileged class in a stratified society dialogues nicely with an economically and socially self-aware set of films in the past year: films like Love, Simon (which openly acknowledges its upper-middle class privilege as a central shtick of its normalizing queer love stories), last year’s Ladybird (which tells the story of a working class girl from “the other side of the tracks”), even films like Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, the working mans’ heist film, or Hell or High Water, the working man’s… heist film. Damn, there have been a lot of white people stealing stuff from people recently.
Beast’s two closest companions in the genre are probably this year’s Thoroughbreds and 2016’s Lady Macbeth. LM and Beast are a bit out of time and ambiguously set while Thoroughbreds leans hard into the zeitgeist, despite the fact that it was delayed by at least a year from wide release. All three films make similar decisions about the kind of story they want to tell in terms of class, privilege, and representation (LM avoids explicit racial discussion, electing for more subtle storytelling). The films meet at a crossroads of psychopathy and youth, young female leads in breakout roles, and messy love stories.
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