Chute’s Tale “Beans” hits big screen> Benefit showing assists film preservation group

Carolyn Chute wants to set the record straight: There is no incest between the father, Lee, and the daughter, Earlene, in her 1984 novel, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.”

She presented her fans with a four-page, handwritten letter of explanation as she autographed her books by candlelight at the State Theatre in Portland Sunday, as a mighty Wurlitzer organ played “Seventy-Six Trombones” in the background.

“The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” the novel, is now the movie. And according to the movie’s producer, Rosilyn Heller, it’s a movie that has won praise from film festival audiences in the United States and abroad in Spain.

Three hundred and eighty-five people paid to see the movie Sunday night at a benefit for Northeast Historic Film, a group in Bucksport that has preserved more than 3 million feet of film and thousands of hours of videotape, shot in or about the three northern New England states.

Chute stood just out of the spotlight that illuminated Bill Phillips, the movie’s screenwriter, as they introduced the movie to the home crowd.

No clapboard houses and no pine trees, Chute said, as Phillips apologized for the fact that the movie was not filmed in Maine but shot instead in Washington state. Producer Heller said in a telephone interview the cost of shooting in Maine would have tripled her $1 million budget.

Work started on the movie soon after the book appeared. Heller, who has worked in Hollywood for more than 25 years, said she fell in love with the story because no other book portrayed poverty, as it exists in the rural North, so compassionately and with such memorable characters.

This is not the Maine of Kennebunkport, she said, and the comparison is made in the movie when Earlene’s father eats Thanksgiving dinner on a TV tray while watching the Bushes eat theirs.

Chute has been damned and praised for her portrayal of rural Mainers, but when asked about the comparisons made between her work and that of William Faulkner, Chute responded, “That’s B.S. I don’t write anything like Faulkner. They think it’s Faulkner because my characters don’t make $100,000 a year.”

Heller sent Chute’s book to Jennifer Warren, who has appeared in more than 20 movies, including “Slap Shot,” and who was looking for a feature-length movie to direct.

Heller, Warren and Phillips all felt strongly about the integrity of the characters and the freshness of the voice Chute used in “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.”

Heller admits that this is not a traditional Hollywood movie and she knew that it only had a chance as a PBS production. Though the movie will be shown in New York, Los Angeles and 25 other cities this November, it will also be aired next year on the PBS series “American Playhouse.”

The novel itself is very episodic, with each chapter shifting its point of view from one character to another. Phillips said he had to put the book into a three-act structure with a definite beginning, middle and end, in order to make it work as a movie. In order to do this, Phillips said, he saw the story as a rural “Romeo and Juliet” and substituted the Pomerleaus and Beans as the Montagues and Capulets.

Even with this structure, the movie is still very episodic. Instead of being a continuous flowing narrative, the first half of the movie is more a series of tableaus, flashing in and out of Earlene’s life, as she watches the Beans from her bathroom window.

Once Earlene’s and Beal’s child is 12, however, we are finally treated to an exquisite scene between Beal and his daughter as she shows him her collection of rotting food, that she hides under her bed. She explains, `I’m a scientist.’ She spends most of her time watching mold grow. Doughnuts are the best, she says, because of their hoary-fingered growth.

It is the first time in the movie that we see two characters actually talk to each other, rather than act in the vicinity of each other in some frenetic frenzy.

But the movie is completely faithful to the voice of the characters, if at times the Maine accents falter a bit. It still gives us vivid, human characters, compassionately drawn as they show us a world few urbanites have ever seen.

The two biggest differences between the book and the movie are the merging of two characters, Roberta, the woman in the wee blue house, which is now a log cabin, and Madeline. The new character, played by Kelly Lynch, comes across as a stern, sensual earth mother, making love to nephew Beal in the cabbage patch.

The other difference between book and movie is the loss of some characters. In the book, we dwell more with characters who make only a brief appearance in the movie.

The movie’s Roberta — unlike Earlene, played by Martha Plimpton, and Beal, played by Patrick McGaw — heads for town and marries a merchant in order to provide for her hoard of variously fathered children. Beal refuses to seek outside help when he is wounded in the eye with a splinter and develops a nasty infection and fever. Earlene implores him to get food stamps; he refuses. Instead he heads with a flashlight and a rifle for the woods, where he finds his final confrontation.

There was a great round of applause during the final credits, and if the movie did nothing else, it whetted people’s appetites for another reading of the novel.

If they wait until March, they will be able to read a revised edition of the work to be issued by Harcourt, Brace — this time with an author’s note assuring the reader that incest is not a part of Earlene’s life.

Chute is currently at work on a story with the working title, “The School on Hearts Content Road.”

Chute says that the story is about windmills. Not a wind farm, but a community that tries to grow closer together and each member has their own source of energy.