‘Beef’ Season 2 Review: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton Sink Their Teeth Into Lee Sung Jin’s Meaty Morality Tale [A-]
“Couples fight, it’s normal. We’re normal.”
“As you get old, friends go away. Parents die. The only person on your side is your spouse.”
The first season of Lee Sung Jin’s Emmy-winning Beef dealt with two strangers whose chance encounter devolves into a spiral of ever-worsening scenarios involving car crashes, money troubles, infidelity and even death. Season two also takes on those same scenarios but this time in a world of married and almost married partners, where the bonds are in a constant state of being so threadbare that they could tear at any moment, and often do.
The season begins (and ends) exactly the same, with a benefit at the fictional Montecito Point Club on the California coast. That’s not really a spoiler but how the cyclical, if not a bit cynical, nature of this part of the world works. Whether it’s saving frogs or bees, the uber wealthy need charities to hide and funnel money from having to pay taxes on it and provides them a mask of philanthropic altruism. Fake snow is laid down as the sun beats down on an army of ants doing their best to stay out of sight as they sneak in to take the spoils of rich country club folk right from under their nose, which they presumably won’t miss. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s the one of the main themes of the season; part ‘eat the rich’ and part Gen Z vs Millennials in a battle for survival, with Gen X and Boomers thrown in to fill out the quartet of generational sparring.
Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin Davis (Charles Melton) are fiancés struggling to get by, her with relationship insecurity issues while working for menial wages at said club, which charges a $300K membership fee but can’t offer good healthcare to its employees, while he’s out of work and attempting to make it as an exercise influencer. Now, the visual of Melton exercising shirtless (a likely thing for him to be doing), making little training videos for YouTube while eating potato chips, reader, I was locked in.
The club’s General Manager, Joshua Martín (Oscar Isaac), and his wife, Lindsay Crane-Martín (Carey Mulligan), are struggling too; both financially as they’ve begun to live past their means but also emotionally, as their marriage is falling apart. She flirts with the club’s hot young tennis instructor while he whacks off to OnlyFans. Both are angling for the attention, approval and protection of the club’s Korean owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), who struggles to manage a scandal involving her second, and much younger, husband, Doctor Kim (Song Kang-ho). While Song is quite entertaining here, he has minimal screen time. Youn fares a bit better and utilizes her petite, grandmotherly nature as a thin veil of disguise very well.
When Joshua leaves his wallet at the club, Ashley and Austin drive their little pistachio-colored Fiat to the Martin’s sprawling mans, a compound gated with a modern exterior like a villain’s lair yet oddly rustic interior with relics and warmth. The young couple witness and record a particularly nasty fight between Joshua and Lindsay (which is much worse than it looks), and in a moment of anxiety-driven spontaneity, choose to blackmail the couple. At first, it works out pretty well for the young duo; Ashley offered an immediate promotion (which requires the firing of a very long-term employee), a huge pay raise, paid vacation and health insurance. All as long as the video is deleted. They agree but almost instantly regret complying so quickly. “We left a lot on the table,” laments Austin. “We have so many more years of being petty,” agrees Ashley.
Joshua has his own regrets to caving into their demands but his own desperation finds him being fast and loose with the club’s finances, and while Ashley is over her head with new duties (including Lindsay giving her number to members, telling them to treat Ashley as their “personal concierge”), he concocts his own plan to make Ashley the scapegoat. But with every successive play, the chasm between Joshua and Lindsay widens, fighting more, with one especially memorable one resulting in a very funny exclamation of “Mezcal Mescal night!” as Joshua mocks Lindsay for crying at Aftersun (one of two mentions the film gets this season in a nice A24 crossover), to which she responds, “I’m going to fuck every guy over 5’9” at the club!” Isaac is having a blast in his exasperation, finding new and exciting avenues of performance. Mulligan is truly exceptional here, doing some career-best work, balancing the sometimes War of the Roses-esque nature of her failing marriage with emotional heft and a deftly sly wit. Not to mention the top two jaw-dropping moments of the entire season.
After a nagging pain won’t go away requiring an ER visit, “Bleeding Love” plays while Ashley is in the hospital, with the meanest staff you’ve ever seen (think Dr. Robby x10). When asked what her pain level is on a scale of 1 to 10 she says, with confused hesitation, “Nine?” The attending berates her about understanding how the pain scale works and that she can’t possibly be at a 9 and able to talk. “I thought it was like Letterboxd,” she replies. “So zero is like Oppenheimer.” It’s a standout episode for the wonderful Spaeny, who manages to turn much of the poking fun at Gen Z sensibilities into fully formed anxiety and worry for the present and future, grounding the fear and panic of merely struggling to exist. After cutting her teeth on Priscilla and Civil War, she’s cementing herself as a crucial actor of her generation. Melton is equally marvelous, channeling the kindness and vulnerability he brought to his breakthrough performance in May December. His delivery here of “You don’t want me, you just want to be left by me” cuts open a universally understood truth.
The season is spectacularly shot by Moonlight cinematographer James Laxton, lensing raw intimacy as deftly as moments of surrealism and a wild action sequence in Korea that I dare not spoil here, and scored by Finneas O’Connell (who appears in the show as himself in one of the season’s many celebrity cameos). As with the first season, new music supervisor Jen Malone (Euphoria) fills the series with Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, M83 and more to pepper mood, place and generation.
Lee Sung Jin and Jake Schreier maintain most of the directing duties again this season, but have brought on Kitao Sakurai (The Eric Andre Show) for two strong episodes. Very new to this season’s writing team is Anna Ouyang Moench (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Severance) with some of the season’s incredibly crisp dialogue, including the finale.
Season one of Beef was a masterful stroke of absurdity and consequence, but season two is even better; finding deeper humanity and groundedness, even with a madcap of a finale that had me gleefully screaming out loud with one sequence. There’s just more, well, meat here.
Grade: A-
All eight episodes of the second season of Beef will be available to stream April 16 only on Netflix.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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