I went into Beeswax apprehensive, and the first thirty minutes did little to allay my concerns. The story dragged; the acting started out questionably; the hyperrealistic script kept running into the problem that real-life conversations are often quite boring (“Well, she called last night, um…and I had come in a couple weeks ago…and I’m friends with her friend Evan…”).
You can only hear so many “ums” and “ahs” before you start to yearn for the ghost of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Tilly Hatcher as Jeannie
By halfway through, something had changed: I cared about protagonist Jeannie (solid debut performance by Tilly Hatcher); her trials and travails as co-owner of an independent business; her rekindling romance with likeable ex-boyfriend Merrill (Alex Karpovsky); and her rootless twin sister Lauren (Tilly’s real-life sister Maggie Hatcher), who’s looking to teach overseas mostly because she has nothing better to do.
I cared because director Andrew Bujalski* doesn’t so much ask you to watch these people as invite you to hang out with them. He cares more about his characters and their context than about the notion of a “good plot.”
Make no mistake: As casual and accidental as Beeswax may look, it’s a deeply deliberate construction. First, it’s shot on film, with clear dedication to color composition and sets that tell stories by themselves.
Second, the filler-word-packed script is in fact a meticulous product that captures a specific slice of contemporary society—that set of middle-class twenty-somethings trying to live their lives consciously and responsibly, and determine if it is indeed possible to “be both righteous and punctual.”
Third, its protagonist, Jeannie, is a romantic lead in a wheelchair—but you barely notice. Bujalski navigates this minefield with a delicacy and matter-of-factness that proves his maturity as a filmmaker.
There’s no denying that Beeswax has problems, and is a little bit annoying. It could have been lifted straight out of Stuff White People Like: Vintage store; Austin; brightly-dressed girls in polka-dots who look like aspiring Anthropologie models; a law student on a retro velour sofa in a 1992 Brown t-shirt studying for the bar on his Mac.
But after you spend an hour and a half with that law student and the people around him, I’ll bet you might like him.
Plays at Northwest Film Forum tonight through Thursday at 7 & 9 PM.
*Perhaps I should have known to give Bujalski more credit, but I’m not the mumblecore aficionado that Josh claims to be.
