There is, no doubt, a right way for artists to approach any topic. Nothing can nor should be off limits for an earnest, educated artist to tackle tricky subject matter with insight and compassion. It’s precisely such an approach that’s required for such a topic as gun culture in the U.S. To an international audience and to many within the U.S., it’s a pretty cut-and-dry affair – get rid of the guns and you pretty much get rid of the problem. But for others within the U.S., firearms are a part of their history and a part of their identity.
Danny Madden’s Beast Beast operates in spaces at polar opposites of this ideological divide – a young man dangerously enamoured with guns, a teenage girl living in a world blissfully free from them – and in a third space, tensely tucked between the two – a teenage boy oscillating perilously between either side of the divide. Madden’s design for these characters isn’t particularly original, though it is perceptive. The gun nut, Adam (Will Madden, the director’s brother), is a young white man raised in a conservative, middle-class home, lacking in conventional social skills. The teenage girl, Krista (Shirley Chen), is a theatre kid, joyful and carefree, sympathetic to the viewer if noticeably sheltered from life’s myriad potential difficulties. The teenage boy, Nito (Jose Angeles), is the son of a wayward, neglectful single father, finding friendship and a sense of belonging with some local petty criminals just a few years older than him. However, he’s also drawn to schoolmate Krista and she to him, the seeds of young love blossoming between them as Nito’s extra-curricular activities become increasingly risky.
It’s not a groundbreaking scenario by any means, though it has boundless potential for exploration, the confluence of such disparate lifestyles promising any number of narrative pursuits for a smart, inquisitive filmmaker. Yet Danny Madden, alas, shows himself here to be anything but. Beast Beast is a clichéd, melodramatic movie covering utterly no new ground en route to its predictable conclusion. Madden has nothing of substance to add to debates on gun culture, contemporary American society or the realities of the country’s youth – he merely co-opts familiar narratives from these spheres to formulate a pat, contrived, non-committal statement on such issues that could surely be better and more efficiently expressed as “Guns: Bad!”
If Madden’s heart is in the right place – and the compassion he has for each and every character herein is palpable – his artistic and technical acumen is lodged firmly in a very, very wrong place indeed. By capitulating to seemingly every last platitude and coincidence available to him, he does a disservice to the messages he strives to communicate. Those messages – of human connection and interaction, of combatting prejudice and violence with love and understanding – come through, just without any nuance and without any original ideas to bolster them. They’re hollow, recycled banalities, like the simplistic slogan of some right-on major corporate entity. And if that’s not egregious enough, Madden has such faith in the validity of these messages in and of themselves that the trite melodrama he’s created apparently appears to him as some profound, truthful slice-of-life piece of human theatre. His style is a faux-edgy, vaguely impressionistic riff on quasi-naturalism, all meaningfully meaningless interactions, handheld cameras and vibrant performances emphasizing the universal ordinariness of the characters, yet always a touch too theatrical to register as actually real.
There’s a place for cheap, contrived cinema in the slick, mass-market dominated artistic landscape of 2021. It’s there in the horror B-movies experiencing a resurgence on streaming platforms, or in the camp satires of cult auteurs like John Waters, sadly experiencing the very opposite. That place, however, is emphatically not in honest, well-intentioned message movies such as Beast Beast. It’s technically competent and adequately performed and thus exactly the kind of place where the kind of crass, corny dramatic liberties it indulges in so frequently are going to stick out horribly; indeed, that very competence adds to Beast Beast a level of respectability that makes its many complacencies all the more offensive. If it could only have been the hammy melodrama it ought to be, it’d be the better for it. If it could only have been a vast deal smarter too, we’d all be the better for it.
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