REVIEW: Honey Boy
Shia LaBeouf rose to stardom in the early 00s after being cast as a goofball brother in the family sitcom Even Stevens. A clear talent, he moved on to pursue larger movie roles and is perhaps best well known for his work in the Transformers series. As the 2010s hit, Shia’s inner struggles started showing themselves more in public. Bizarre interviews. Confusing performance art. Disorderly conduct charges.
In 2017 he was sentenced to 1 year probation after screaming at a cop in Savanna Georgia. He would later say this saved his life, allowing him to get off drugs and alcohol, understand his PTSD disorder, and live as a better person.
It was in rehab that Shia wrote Honey Boy. A meditation on his life but not a 100% representation. The lead character, Otis, is a child star turned action star who gets into a drunken car wreck. This sends him to rehab, where for the first time he’s forced to reflect on his anger, depression, and addiction. Otis has to reconcile how much of his life is performance, why he feels so much pain, and how he should move forward.
It’s intimate and deeply sad.
Director Alma Har'el got the script from Shia, not as a pitch, but as a friend.
He needed to work through his life and felt a script would be the way to do it. She wanted to help him. Who else would? Together they finished Honey Boy and eventually decided to move forward with the therapy as an actual movie… but only if Shia would play his own abusive father. A way to release some the complicated aspects in his traumatic childhood.
The song “I Wish” by Skee-Lo was heavily featured in the marketing for Honey Boy and for good reason. The track works an excellent companion piece to what makes the film so interesting. Both are vulnerable pieces but rife with machismo, containing characters who struggle to figure out love and identity while plagued by an unsympathetic world. They’re self-deprecating, but still optimistic. Both Shia and Skee-Lo take a look at their situations and want more than what they have, but ultimately, they are forced deal with what they were born into.
Every performer shows tremendous ability Honey Boy. So much emotion pours out of the frame, and even in the worst scenes I was reminded of how complicated our lives can be. The movie doesn’t excuse toxic behavior, but it gives you an empathetic window into push and pull of it, showing how a person’s life can domino out unexpectedly, ripple across generations, and lead to unfortunate places. Alma Har'el navigates all this with a lot of creativity, intercutting surreal moments with aspects that feel almost documentarian. (Which makes sense considering her background is in documentary filmmaking)
Do I wish it spent a bit more time in the aftermath? Do I wish we could have watched a modern Shia (but not Shia) dealing with the consequences of his behavior and relationship with his father? Um, yeah. Yes. I would have wanted to see more of that.
The movie earns its run time and bears so much heartbreak but by the end there’s a lot that feels unanswered. Unexplored even. Maybe that’s because those questions don’t have answers? Maybe that’s because some things should remain unperformed? Maybe they didn’t have the time? Who knows?! In my opinion, it made the film less satisfying. Less cathartic. I felt like I got the point of why the movie was made, and it made me reflect on a lot of things, but I didn’t get the sense of release I thought the film was going for. The sense of release I hoped for. I dunno. I’d be willing to bet Shia and Alma don’t really care about my opinion on the matter.
Regardless, Honey Boy is a stunning feature debut, very heartfelt, and meta in a good way. It’s worth your time not only for the impressive performances but expert direction and poignant theming.
4/5
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