Beeswax Written and Directed by Andrew Bujalski
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Whenever an artistic trend generates so much adoring press a backlash can’t be far behind, and in this case it arrived in the form of a devastating piece by Amy Taubin for the November-December 2007 issue of Film Comment. Mumblecore, she declared, “never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding.” Though the films all shared a shaggy, lo-fi aesthetic, Taubin wrote, their chief defining characteristics were their homogeneity and their insularity: “The directors are all male middle-class Caucasians, and they make movies exclusively about young adults who are involved in heterosexual relationships and who have jobs (when they have them) in workplaces populated almost exclusively by SWMs and SWFs.” Taubin singled out Swanberg, a Chicagoan, in particular, calling his movies “smug and blatantly lazy” and “such fountains of lad-magazine culture that the DVDs might work as Maxim inserts.”
The larger problem for Bujalski isn’t the word but what it’s come to represent: a myopic view of the world that both celebrates and panders to a small, disaffected, college-educated audience. Having defined a trend, he now has to worry about that trend defining him.
