This movie is a trip. Here are some loosely connected thoughts I had after watching.

Obvious Oedipal themes but also unconscious emotional gaslighting. Mona felt guilt over her part in her husband's death and couldn't face it head on. She "separated" Beau into two archetypes, the doting little boy she can dominate, and the independent, confident boy she feels he must evolve into. However, she cannot resolve the fact that she wants Beau to mature, but as he does, he starts sniffing out her role in his father's death, and she can't have that. She says he must "learn to match" his crush's confidence, but unconsciously prevents that from happening constantly. She eventually "locks away" the assertive Beau rather than confronting it. This leaves a lingering suspicion in Beau's mind that his mom had something to do with this. The logical endgame of that projection is that his mom is the mastermind of EVERYTHING in the movie, every character has been paid off by her as a "test" of sorts for Beau. Her whole corporation was devoted to his "growth", or lack of.

This further manifests the confusing feelings of guilt and shame that animate Beau. He feels like he did something bad but doesn't really know what. Its his mother's lingering guilt and now it is his. Every interaction with a woman is a reflection of this toxic template that began with his birth.

1. Beau is put in a situation where he is a passenger without true agency
2. At the moment Beau takes the reigns, the story immediately changes and he is on the receiving end of tragedy and guilt, gaslit into believing it was through his own agency

Right from the opening scene, this is the template. Beau didn't ask to be born. But from that first moment of conception, its been "his fault". "Clawing through me to get out", uninterested in feeding, --all maternal projection.

Nathan Lane's daughter is the instigator forcing Beau to smoke a joint. Yet right when he FINALLY obliges, the story switches and it is now HIS fault for the chemicals she ingested.

Beau did not ask for Elaine to seduce him and the risk is that he will have a heart murmur like his dad. However, once he FINALLY obliges, the story switches and it is now HIS fault Elaine is dead.

The movie kinds of posits that there are two births, the first birth into the world from the womb, and then the second birth, an untethering from maternal projection.

This is the death Beau experiences on the boat, "admitting to his sins in front of peers", finally breaking free from his mom's messy baggage. It is a boundary that he brushed up against all through his life but never finally breached. Akin to the feeling of the very idea that you have of "love", completely being indifferent to your demise, even sometimes gleeful.

The stage play in the woods felt like commentary on how we have all this psychological BS to work out, and we use "stories" to do it. But in the end, the stories aren't really you. Those kids aren't really yours. Sometimes, stories are just circular logic that bring you right back to the same wall you've been trying to breach.

Part of me thinks the ending of the film is literal, and Beau dies without ever "getting out of his own head", so to speak. Another part of me thinks everything after he smoked the joint in the daughter's car had been a psychological dream journey of him overcoming the shadow of his mom. Now that he has, he will awake in the car, having passed out from the joint, ready to visit his mother (who hasn't died) without fear since he has learned "not to go back to the same old well that got him sick". He learned about the "good water" instead.