MOVIE REVIEW : Solid Performances Give Power to Rambling ‘Beans’

“The Beans of Egypt, Maine” is full of family and place. Adapted from Carolyn Chute’s 1984 debut novel, it showcases a shambling cast of characters and enough backwoodsy local color to double as a documentary. The film, like the book, has an almost messianic mission: It wants to give poor rural white people their due after generations of caricature.

It doesn’t really succeed in vaulting cartoonishness, though a few of the performers score personal triumphs.

Directed by Jennifer Warren and scripted by Bill Phillips, the film works up a woodsy Romeo and Juliet-style atmosphere. Earlene Pomerleau (Martha Plimpton) lives with her family next door to the rowdy Beans, a clan of shaggy varmints and ne’er-do-wells including patriarch Reuben (Rutger Hauer) and his mate, Roberta (Kelly Lynch), and Beal (Patrick McGaw), who likes to chop wood with his shirt off. Earlene, despite her father’s almost biblical distaste for the Beans, gets pregnant by Beal--and pulled into the clan.

It’s more than she bargained for but, as the years wind on, she becomes one of them, and it’s not so bad. She finds in the Beans the coziness of family, a sense of belonging. Her long-term scrapes with Beal, and her growing attachment to Roberta, who has her own brood by Beal, keep her rooted.

Rootedness is real big in “Beans.” But the film does a better job by the roots than the plants. The Beans, with the exception of Roberta, never seem like full-bodied people. They don’t shed their shaggy, scary trappings the more we get to know them. Salt-of-the-earth types often come across as stunted in the movies, and the Beans are more stunted than most. By comparison, the Joads in “Grapes of Wrath” seem like a gaggle of Ph.Ds.

But some of the family-feeling stuff comes through anyway because of the performances of Plimpton and Lynch. Jennifer Warren is also a veteran actress, and her work with these women is exemplary. Plimpton goes from a randy, hormone-driven girl to a caring, full-grown woman. She’s worldly in her world.

Lynch is even better: She’s great at conveying how Roberta’s lust for Beal is cross-wired with her exasperation with him. When Roberta emerges as a “respectable” wife, we don’t see her transformation as a victory for the middle-class over the dirt-poor. It’s just a change in circumstance for Roberta, and she’s as gracious and intuitive in wealth as in poverty. “Beans” is a long haul but Plimpton and Lynch pull you through it.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality and language. Times guidelines: It includes a fairly graphic nude scene and a gruesome scene involving backwoods eye surgery.

‘The Beans of Egypt, Maine’

Martha Plimpton: Earlene Pomerleau Kelly Lynch: Roberta Bean Rutger Hauer: Reuben Bean Patrick McGaw: Beal Bean An American Playhouse Theatrical Films and I.R.S. Media Production. Director Jennifer Warren. Producer Rosilyn Heller. Executive producers Lindsay Law, Miles A. Copeland III, Paul Colichman. Screenplay by Bill Phillips, based on the Carolyn Chute novel. Cinematographer Steven Larner. Editor Paul Dixon. Costumes Candace Clements. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* In limited release at the Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, Westside Pavilion between Westwood and Overland, West Los Angeles, (310) 475-0202.