"Beautiful Boy"

This seems to be the season of good performances in so-so films.  Such is the case of "Beautiful Boy", a painful tale set in the midst of the modern opioid crisis.  Timothee Chalamet has again gained a good bit of attention for his work as a troubled young man but I was impressed by Steve Carrell as the father who would do anything for his child but can't stop his son from falling off the cliff of drug addiction.  Sadly, Mr. Carell is not nominated in the SAG awards.  If he was, I would vote for him.  There is something unique about a parent's pain, and a parent's struggle, watching their kid suffering.  Mr. Carrell does it brilliantly.  Outside a a few good performances the film is otherwise a bit of a scramble and didn't really hit the emotional notes I expected it to.  The gifted Maura Tierney isn't given much to do and the editing bounces back and forth along the timeline, layering vocal tracks from the current period over visions of the past and vice versa.  It can be jarring and confusing.  Characters, such as the boy's NA sponsor, look interesting but barely make an impact as they come in and out of the narrative.  The younger siblings appear in several scenes but always seem to be the same age, despite the good number of years which are most likely covered.  Lastly, this film makes the same sin as many others these days -- it keeps the dialogue quiet and soft, then blares music, requiring the viewer to ride the volume button on the remote.  The opioid crisis is important and a host of new films coming out are addressing it.  I can only hope that some of them are better put together than this film, which comes across as Ladybird filming with the heavy-handed moralism of an after-school special.  At one point "Sunrise, Sunset" from "Fiddler on the Roof" swells underneath a parental pacing, which left me groaning, not crying.  The film is based on a book.  Read the book, you are more likely to get authenticity.