Imagine a movie about a strange Utopias nether-realm in which no one over the age of 35 exists; in which privacy of deed and thought is not an option; in which the greatest threat to social order is one's growth as a human being; in which food has been entirely replaced by coffee and cigarettes. No, it isn't a remake of 1984 or Logan's Run -- it's this movie, this really good comedy about a community in San Francisco called North Beach.
At a glance, it chronicles the misadventures of a guy named Tyler, whose girlfriend Paige puts the screws to him after he messes around with a 19-year-old stripper from New Orleans. It's a well constructed plot, certainly worth the price of the DVD to watch it unfold firsthand, but perhaps more interesting (for the purposes of this review, at least) is everything else this movie is at the same time: a heartfelt tribute to the North Beach community itself, and a heartfelt tribute to that other strange Utopias nether-realm: the one between leaving school and embarking on real adulthood.
Any fact-based setting has two potential on screen personalities: the one synthesized by a team of L.A. location scouts, and the one revealed by people who know and love the place, who understand its real chemistry and know how to capture it -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. The latter has been achieved with such easy humor by director Mortenson and company that within fifteen minutes you feel like you're watching old friends in a place that's somehow very familiar. If you find yourself rolling your eyes in exasperation -- either from Tyler and/or his oddball friends, or from the chronic Bay Area parking menace (a problem finally given the screen time it deserves) -- it is because these characters are flawed the way real friends are flawed, and so is this funky little neighborhood.
You can shrug your shoulders and forgive these flaws so readily, as is true with real friends, because they are portrayed with such honesty and genuine affection. You've seen some of the faces before: "Robbie the Lush" is a haunted overnight courier in a DHL commercial; "Pete the Rock Star" appears in everything from IBM Small Business ads to Doritos ads to HBO's Band of Brothers; Gabrielle Anwar (Scent of a Woman, The Three Musketeers) lends her big-screen clout in a role heralded simply as "The Cameo". This kind of who-are-we-trying-to-fool sensibility belies the confidence and understated skill of the filmmakers and performers alike: it's easy to forget that you're watching a movie, no small feat for a first feature-length effort.
(The camaraderie so evident on screen carries over behind the scenes as well: director Mortenson and company provide an entertaining commentary track over a few rounds of beer, and finally confirm for audiences everywhere that yes, people do take restroom breaks when they record those things.) But the real heart of the movie lies in its portrayal of the stasis and claustrophobia that can occur when friends know each other too well, when the routines that carry us through school and the first few years after begin to feel less like freedom and more like prison. At the heart of Tyler's floundering around and f***ing things up is the understanding that he needs to move on to the next step, no matter how scary or unpredictable that can be. It is interesting that, in a movie so intently focused on the ins and outs of the North Beach community, specific mention is made that the stripper Tyler has embraced is from somewhere else; his attempt to escape what North Beach has become to him is misdirected, but he knows escape is necessary. It is painful truth that the solution to Tyler's problem lies in his relationship with Paige all along, and that he doesn't realize it until it may be too late. As Tyler's dialogue with "Veronica the Player" brings to light, his crime isn't necessarily his indiscretion with the stripper; everybody in this group has been in bed with everybody else. His crime lies in the fact that Paige is beyond that kind of casual silliness, and therein lies the path to adulthood that he knows he needs, but has probably lost.
But that's a lot more film-school crap than is really necessary here. The bottom line is, North Beach is a funny movie, well crafted and well acted; it's a great portrait of this interesting place and its offbeat population; let's hope to God this ain't it for Morty and friends, because I sense many more good movies up their sleeves.
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