TIFF 2020 film review: 'Beans'

Set against a real-life conflict between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian government, the coming-of-age drama 'Beans' (screening during the 45th Toronto International Film Festival) is a First Nations story told by First Nations storytellers.

In short: Twelve-year-old Beans is a gifted and sweet-natured girl trying to find her place in her Mohawk community - while her Indigenous family has an active role in a contentious stand-off between First Nations peoples and the Quebec government in 1990.

Writer-director Tracey Deer's debut feature wisely chronicles the real-life 1990 Oka Crisis through the eyes of a girl trying to figure out who she is and who she wants to become. Beans is old enough to realize the gravity of the situation, but young enough to experience everything with fresh eyes. This recounting of the standoff is unencumbered by the specific politics of the protest - those details are best left to documentaries. Instead "Beans" views the historic stand-off through the lens of a normal adolescent - it's her family that is on the front lines of the protest and her family that gets assaulted and called 'savages' by racist mobs. 'Beans' is less about the particulars of the stand-off and more about how the standoff affected the Mohawk communities.

The coming-of-age genre is fundamentally rooted in a young person determining who they are as individuals and not as children of their parents. And much like the titular character herself struggling to take control of her own identity, 'Beans' also finds an entire community of people fighting to assert their individuality in the world. Beans finds herself with straddling two cultures, as she aspires to attend a prestigious private school (where the students are primarily Caucasian), she also wishes to fit in with the kids in her community.

This indie drama is a bit tonally uneven, sometimes vacillating between lighter moments of typical adolescence and weightier moments of outright hate crimes. There's some whiplash in watching an angry mob assail a family ... and just 5 minutes later, watch that same family have fun by the pool. The script throws a lot at Beans to deal with - and because of the film's lean runtime, sometimes "Beans" doesn't give the story or characters enough breathing room between scenes. This is one of the rare instances a slightly longer runtime would improve the film greatly: adding just a bit more padding between tumultuous scenes would make the emotional transitions less jarring.

Final verdict: "Beans" is a layered story with a conflicted protagonist who feels very much like an outsider among the non-Indigenous community and even among children her own age.

Score: 3/5

'Beans' screens during TIFF 2020. This drama is not yet rated and has a running time of 92 minutes.

(Image courtesy of TIFF)