The movie opens an engagement today at the Opera Plaza Cinemas, the
sort of intimate theater that suits the film, which is a wallow in a
down-
home atmosphere that highlights human attributes that are sometimes
hidden in urban life. The Maine setting might just as well be
Appalachia, southern Oregon or the Idaho panhandle.
Like the book, the unvarnished story of neighbor families — one a
rough lumberman’s clan, the other given to tidiness and Bible-quoting
– co-existing on the fringes of a backwoods hamlet is a visit to a
place and lifestyle that seem like endangered species. These people
speak a poetry of plainspoken country idioms that recall the ironic
lyricism of Flannery O’Connor.
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“The Beans of Egypt, Maine” stars Martha Plimpton as the
somewhat homely, gawky Earlene Pomerleau, who, in spite of her
father’s puritanical admonitions, is attracted to the lusty,
scandalous Bean family.
The Beans live in a blighted compound of old trailers, ramshackle
woodsheds and dead cars. They survive on lumber-
hauling jobs the men get by virtue of being the owners of a clunky
old Peterbilt truck.
ROWDY POVERTY
Bean family patriarch Reuben, played with hulking energy by
Rutger Hauer, is a hardworking, hard-driving logger who has sired
many children and lives in rowdy but desperate poverty with his
common-
law wife, a sultry dishwater blonde named Roberta, played by Kelly
Lynch.
Like the younger Earlene next door, Roberta has nothing if not a
longing heart. Lynch is luminous in the part, her smile touched by
the forlorn.
Since childhood, spindly Earlene has fixated on a Bean spawn named
Beal, a wiry
youth with unkempt good looks. Although he is uneducated and as
locked into poverty as the rest of the forbidden Beans, Beal is
earnest and kind. If Earlene even dares mention the Beans, however,
her stern father washes her mouth out with soap.
Beal, perhaps the film’s real discovery, is played by newcomer
Patrick McGaw, in a beguiling performance that perfectly captures a
stud with a heart-on-his-sleeve quality.
MAKING THE MOVE
To be involved with the Beans is to be involved with continual
upheavals tied to passion, pride and poverty. When Reuben is sent to
prison for beating up a lawman who interferes with his off-season
deer hunting, young, sinewy Beal makes a move on the beautiful
Roberta. Earlene watches with her heart in knots.
There is no other world for Beal, Roberta and Earlene, and the
film captures the cold prison of poverty and the intricate emotional
writhings of the humans stuck in it with bitter humor and eccentric
twists.
“The Beans of Egypt, Maine” was directed by actress Jennifer
Warren, a first-feature effort underwritten by American Playhouse,
whose executive producer, Lindsay Law, spent eight years coaxing the
reclusive writer to grant screen rights to her novel.
The film is haunting, amusing, a little raw at times, but
refreshingly odd. Plimpton (the troubled teenage mom in
“Parenthood”) is a little ungainly as Earlene, and it takes a while
to warm up to her unusual looks.
This “little film” has the feeling of being a labor of love for
those involved (it was shot on a minuscule budget in four weeks). A
simple music track featuring the mellow yet lonesome croon of a dobro
adds an appealing country shading.