Review of Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy
Review by Tiffany McIntyre
Developmentally Edited by Alexandra Hidalgo
Copy Edited and Posted by Sophie Schmidt
Honey Boy (2019). 1 hour 34 minutes. Directed by Alma Har’el. Written by Shia LaBeouf. Starring Shia LeBeouf, Noah Jupe, and Lucas Hedges.
Young Otis (Noah Jupe) and his father, James Lort (Shia LaBeouf).
An explosion overtakes the screen, sending Otis, a 20-something-year-old with short hair, a leather jacket, and freckles, flying backward shouting “no, no, no, no!” Fire extinguishers gush out the special effects flames. Otis stands with a non-expressive look on his face and crew members help him out of his harness. We are immediately led through a series of scenes cutting between different movie sets: Otis carries a child through a sewer, Otis is in his trailer and takes a drink of alcohol, Otis holds a gun for a movie, Otis in a bath with a young, blonde woman, Otis in his trailer and taking a drink out of a bottle of liquor, Otis driving with the woman and suddenly, a crash and a high pitched ringing and tire screeches and horns. Our chaotic introduction to Otis lays the foundation for his process in rehab. Covered in warm tones and soft voices, the rehab center is where Otis is introduced to the prospect of writing “an account of his memories that make his distress levels unmanageable.” And so, the birth of the script, and the film, begins.
Otis as a 12-year-old boy with brown, curly hair and a Hawaiian shirt is stationed in the middle of the screen against a black background. He stands in yet another harness, yet this time as he is flown back, a pie covered in whipped cream moves in slow motion and hits him in the face. This scene parallels the opening and is accompanied by bright, calming piano music. It is shot with the same camera angles and the use of a follow shot that is identical to the first one. As this Otis exits the set, he pops on his headset attached to a portable CD player and Skee-Lo’s “I Wish” plays. In dim lighting, tucked behind set pieces, the camera follows Otis to his dad, Jeff, hitting on a woman by talking about “chicken shit” and the first-ever daredevil chicken.
Har’el takes us on a journey through the meta, grounding the movie in the ambiguity of Otis’s complex relationship with his father. Based on LaBeouf’s experience as a child actor supporting his father, Har’el uses color and lighting to move between Otis as a 12-year-old living in a dingy motel with his ex-rodeo clown dad James Lort, Otis in the present as he battles alcoholism at a rehabilitation facility, and a dreamscape that fluidly sews together the two timelines.
Har’el is a visual artist. She uses a magenta-colored light of a motel sign and slow-moving camera angles to take us into the present day mind of Otis, communicating both a flashback Otis is having and placing the audience in the very moment of Otis developing a too-mature romantic relationship. He swims with his grown-up lover, a sex worker who lives in his motel complex, as they caress each other. The transitions between these dream-like flashbacks are so swift that it takes a moment to realize what timeline you are in. This overlap is intentional, a poetic visual experience of past hurts and living impacting the emotions of today. Har’el connects each scene thematically. In some it is neon lighting, in others the blindness of the sun, in yet another, the constant artifact is a motorcycle. This technique of having a singular constant to create transitions is ingenious. The elements she uses differ between scenes, but she always keeps one element to blur the line between the two timelines and to guide the audience’s attention from scene to scene.
Each scene grows the intimacy with the audience as present-day Otis unpacks layers of how his childhood experiences left him struggling with PTSD. We see intense closeups looking up at Otis as he squints in the bright sun, as he yells at this therapist with rapid transitions to each object he focuses on to calm himself down, “door,” “plant,” “you.” We are next to his wrist as he slaps a rubber band over and over in failed attempts to not storm out of his therapy session. Har’el cultivates a togetherness as we watch Otis unveil his pain and develop a closeness with himself.
Har’el’s ability to make us see this character as fully human rather than a unilateral character takes talent and ingenuity. Otis is not a likable character when he is yelling at his therapist or apprehensive about admitting he has a problem when it is so clear he does, but by using close-ups to make vulnerable shots and placing Otis in isolated places, Har’el creates a foundation of empathy. She reveals the hurt that present-day and past Otis feels without relying too heavily on dialogue or exposition.
One of the most emotionally climactic moments is seeing Otis walk away from the therapy center in daylight into lush woods. As younger Otis picks up a stick, present-day Otis finds a stick; young Otis goes into a junkyard and starts hitting the cars, present-day Otis finds a stump and starts yelling as hard and loud as he can; younger Otis does the same. There is a resonant sense of innocence of younger-Otis doing this as the present-day Otis, riddled with PTSD, performs the same act he did years before. Younger-Otis, has no sense of where this lifestyle will take him, but we, the audience, see where it brings him, right to that moment of emotional overflow.
This film is the telling of Shia Lebeouf’s childhood and it portrays the story in a beautifully performed braided narrative. However, there are some issues that I think need to be addressed. Lebeouf wrote the film and it must have been extremely hard as he understandably is processing dark experiences. That being said, the way in which the film addresses race and gender is problematic. Though the relationship with an older woman may be true to his experience, her character is named “Shy Girl.” As an Afrolatinx woman, she is already a minority figure in the film. One of the questions asked in the Bechdel Test for a film’s portrayal of gender is whether the women characters have names. It seems fairly simple but it isn’t. Having a name is a sign of significance and respect toward a character. Since “Shy Girl” does play a crucial role in potential contributions to issues later on in Otis’s life, she should have been given a name. Similarly to “Shy Girl” and “The Therapist,” people of color are not as well-drawn as they could or even should be in the film. Otis’s father, James, who has obvious anger issues, takes his anger out on his Black, Latinx neighbors. During his time in rehab, Otis has a Black roommate named Percy, whom he does take advice from, but we know very little about him as a character. While he is a secondary character who does not play a large role in the film, we only get hints of who he is through his interactions with Otis. As one of the only characters of color, it would have been nice to have more insight on his history and experiences to broaden the representation of diverse characters in the film.
An added dynamic of this film is that Lebeouf plays the character that represents his father. The complexity of embodying this man and portraying his treatment towards Lebeouf as a child takes a vast amount of courage, self-awareness, and compassion. Lebeouf’s performance (and screenwriting) is worthy of a standing ovation. Har’el’s ability to direct this complex and meta-relational film led to her have rightfully received the First-Time Feature Film award from the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing.
Har’el uses repeated images from childhood to adulthood to strike empathy in the audience, then uses bold colors to put a euphoric mask over the darkness of Otis’s life. The film is a masterpiece of using ambiguity and playing with light and color to show the depth of how the ways in which our families treat us and how we grow up shape our mental and emotional states, for better or for worse. It handles trauma in a mesmerizing upfront and visually poetic way that reverberates long after watching it.
You can watch Honey Boy on Amazon Prime. Learn more about Alma Har’el through her website. Connect with Tiffany on her profile.