Beeswax
Directed by Andrew Bujalski
Runtime: 100 min.

Husbands (Sony DVD)
Directed by John Cassavetes

AUDIENCES MUST DO half Andrew Bujalski’s work for him in Beeswax, the mumblecore director’s Texas-set film. It’s about two women surviving life’s most ordinary irritations: Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher) runs a vintage clothes boutique and aimless Lauren (Maggie Hatcher) looks for a job, a man, anything to occupy herself. Trouble is, Bujalski’s blasé narrative accomplishes only half his storytelling task. Nothing he puts on screen makes these women interesting; a viewer stretches patience to put together mundane details of Jeannie and Lauren’s sisterhood or their obscure pasts. It takes commitment just to stay attentive.

Yeah, I know that’s mumblecore’s selling point. Denying conventional narrative information—and pleasure—is what makes the movement “hip.” It presumes richer, subtler enjoyment than Hollywood fare (like, say, Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson’s execrable Bride Wars) but, unfortunately, Beeswax requires subjective identification with Jeannie, Lauren, their friends and milieu. Like 1990s indie rock, mumblecore rejects the idea of “popular” art in order to propagate coterie culture. Bujalski’s informal framing and withheld information combines ineptitude and narcissism—a contemporary version of the old art-movie snobbery. But it’s also unsatisfying.You work very hard for tiny rewards. Only a cinema-illiterate could mistake this for an advance.

Mumblecore fans should seek out the disinherited granddaddy of their movement, John Cassavetes, whose 1970 film Husbands has just been released on Sony DVD. Opposing Hollywood studio methods, Cassavetes used naturalism and improvisation to convey overlooked truths about American life. Husbands illustrates Cassavetes’ ideal mix of honesty and drama because, ironically, it fused theatrical tradition with cinematic license. Cassavetes, co-starring with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara—all accomplished actors—committed themselves to the exploration of authentic American male experience. As three white suburban marrieds, they go on an extended binge: drinking, playing hoops, womanizing. This midlife final fling, acting-out their panic following a friend’s death, dramatizes the period’s male response to feminism.That’s already too much concept for Bujalski, who seems to distrust drama and so attenuates it.

Beeswax is casual to a fault. It’s as if Bujalski stumbles upon Jeannie’s fight with her store partner, Lauren’s embarrassment over former boyfriends and Merrill’s (Alex Karpovsky) friendship/courtship with Jeannie and other social dealings.The title alludes to shared, or betrayed, confidences but there’s actual conversation about the term “Buttinski” and its origin—a deliberate distraction. Similarly, the performers suggest “anti-acting”—a pretense that what we’re watching is real. It’s short-cut Cassavetes but not as amusing. Husbands’ extraordinary trio evokes average-life complexities; they surpass mere realism by commenting on it with all their representational skills. Not only recognizable as Army-vet, work-weary men, they show the meaning behind their juvenile acting-out.The history of American male aggression and insecurity comes filtered through Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara’s bravado. Better than authentic, they’re fascinating; whereas Beeswax’s cast at its best is, well, familiar.

Enervating as Cassavetes’ method could be (Husbands runs two-and-a-half hours), the end result was revelatory; he discovered his characters’ psychological and cultural essence. Ideology shows in their every action, quirk, folly—in their sincerity.The 100-minute Beeswax feels just as long, yet it’s meager. After registering Jeannie’s officious manner and pink-streaked blonde hair; Lauren’s smirking, scrunching, lip-chewing tics; and the weak-willed men they attract, that’s it. One unprepossessing person follows another. (“I feel great about it, I really do” is a sample dialogue banality.)

Bujalski bests Cassavetes’ concentration on emotional cripples by featuring a physically challenged heroine—as if his generation lacked neuroses.Wheelchair-bound Jeannie seems remarkably well adjusted—self-confident and sexually active.Tilly Hatcher displays a direct stare plus a strong, wide back and shoulders. Her feminine strength is complimented by sibling Maggie’s gangly tomboy, whose athleticism lovingly compensates for the other’s immobility.The film’s visual climax shows the girls piggybacking across a field.They could be as striking a pair as Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorléac in The Young Girls of Rochefort if Bujalski had Jacques Demy’s grace and taste. But instead of elegance, Bujalski offers drab ordinariness. Everything in Beeswax is quotidian. Its fauxrealness encourages audiences to forsake a critical appreciation of Hollywood style— thus, reasserting middle-class hegemony.

If I seem resistant to Bujalski, it’s because he extracts cinematic richness—apparently ignorant of the aesthetic possibilities in films from Demy to Cassavetes, Altman, Rohmer and Mike Leigh. Bujalski heads a movement where young filmmakers think they’ve found an original means of authenticating experience. But the mumblecore generation seems unaware its feelings can be made into beautiful cinema. André Téchiné’s 1986 Wild Reeds (which I’ll be introducing at the Museum of Modern Art this Wednesday at 7 p.m.) is the finest example of what they’re missing.

So, despite misgivings, let me state that Beeswax is the best mumblecore film I’ve seen. Bujalski almost gets past the movement’s typical class snobbery. Jeannie and Lauren, his Texan Valkyries, are seen working and struggling in the universal sense. They don’t dance like the kids in Wild Reeds, but at least they don’t do the self-pitying Williamsburg Wallow.