Beans resonates then and now
There's no better time — or, to put it another way, no worse time — for a movie like Beans. Despite the simple title, director Tracey Deer's drama is a hard-hitting look at the Oka crisis of 1990, and particularly its effects on the Indigenous women and children.
The event has been chronicled before in documentaries — two by Alanis Obomsawin alone. Even the role of women has been the subject of a film, Christine Welsh's 1994 doc Keepers of the Fire. But Deer's movie comes from a very personal place. In 1990, Deer was 12 years old, the same age as her protagonist. Even her Mohawk name, Tekahentahkhwa, is the same.
“Or you can call me Beans,” says the character, played by the assured young performer Kiawentiio. “Everybody does.”
Beans is trying to make a good impression during an interview to get into a prestigious high school, after the administrator stumbles over her multisyllabic name. But when her community becomes the flashpoint for a dispute between the Mohawks of Kahnawake and the Oka Golf Club, she finds there are bigger things to worry about. (Also: Burial ground or extra nine holes? You couldn't craft a more one-sided, sympathetic conflict.)
Deer's movie hews close to
Beans's view of the conflict, which at first strikes her as exciting more than scary. She and her little sister help build a barricade, and there are all those cops hanging around. It's kind of cool.
But then racism enters the picture. The girls and their mom (Rainbow Dickerson) are turned away from a grocery store just off the reserve. Heading home, they are roughed up by a group of white townsfolk upset with the road closures and heightened tensions in the region. Later still, we see another mob hurling rocks at their car while police stand by, not interfering.
Beans, angry and anxious to do something — anything — to assert herself, falls in with a group of older kids led by April (Paulina Alexis), a tough-talking young woman who swears and knows how to throw a punch. Beans quickly learns how to tone down her natural sunniness in the name of looking cool. She also creates her own crop top, which only annoys her parents — which only makes her act out all the more.
It's worth noting that Dickerson provides a powerful point of contrast. Her character is very pregnant for much of the film, and thus radiates a powerful life force. The scene in which she leads a group of women in between the police and Mohawk barricades to defuse a gunsdrawn situation is exhilarating.
If I had a complaint against Beans, it would be that its 92 minutes features one too many scenes of those angry, rock-throwing white Quebecers. I'm not denying that it happened, but by the third time its narrative power is diluted. Also, the conflict's conclusion comes on fast, with little focus on the complicated history behind the crisis. But to be fair, Beans is not setting out to explain history. This is, at its heart, a coming-of-age story, and a reminder that the times and tides in which we stretch out toward adulthood will forever mark us, as individuals and as a people.