Life is, when you stop long enough to think about it, a series of transitions.
We don’t necessarily view them that way since much of life is one hurried leap from one moment to another but with hindsight firmly engaged and a rare second to fall into introspection, you can see how who you are at one stage of life bears little to no resemblance to who you were earlier on.
That’s not completely true, of course, since there’s always a bedrock of well-embedded personality and robust sense of self that persists throughout our lives, but the change that envelops that essence of who we are is real and constant and on full display in Beautiful Dreamer, a film directed by Amy Glazer to a play and screenplay by Patricia Cotter.
In this picture postcard slice of life in modern San Francisco, four people, two of whom have been friends since college days in Brooklyn and who have brought their respective partners into a very close friendship mix, are trying to figure out what the next stage of their life will look like.
The pieces are there and they are being assiduously put together but as we all know that doesn’t mean there won’t be drama, missteps, anxiety, estrangement and a whole bunch of other complications, all elements in the frothy contradictory messiness we have no choice but to call life.
The two friends in question are Billy (Louis Ozawa) and Margaret (Erin Daniels) who live close by each other in downtown San Francisco and see each other pretty much every day.
Their worlds are joined closely and you might think irrevocably together, a relational intimacy that sometimes looks like it supersedes their respective intimate partnerships, Billy with Sara (Jennifer Mudge) and Margaret, who jokes that her name makes her sound like she needs help getting out of an easy chair, with Jen (Kathryn Smith-McGlynn).
Their respective relationships are tight and close and in the hazy, languorous bubble of close, enduring friendship, you could be forgiven for thinking life will never change.
But that is, of course, not the way things go because life is always on the march, dragging the status quo kicking and screaming along with it, and soon writer Margaret, who is struggling with a fearsomely entrenched bout of writer’s block (the kind that comes with white empty screens and blinking, mocking cursors), has to deal with the fact that Billy and Sara, and their toddler daughter are moving to Oakland, across the bay and a million miles from the cosy arrangement life has hitherto wrapped itself around.
Possessed of witty retorts and an often sage ability to distill life into its core essence, Margaret flounder somewhat in the afterwash of the move, wanting to be there for her friend, but unsure how to navigate a world in which Billy is not just around the corner, he and Sara have a second kid along the way by a surrogate named Crystal (Tate Moore) and she has to finish a book and work the shape her relationship with long-term partner Jen will take in the future.
There is a lot going on and for the most part, Beautiful Dreamer nicely captures the rhythm and flow of change in all its slow-moving chaotic splendour.
For the truth is that change is rarely dramatic, no matter how many stories might try to convince you otherwise, and mostly moves in slow, wandering arcs, giving you time to catch up if you have the mind to, which let’s face it isn’t always the case.
Even when we know change is all but inevitable, which Margaret acknowledges and mostly embraces, adapting to changed circumstances can be a challenge, and bring with it a host of complicating emotions and kinks in what was a straightforward, sustaining kind of life.
There are times in the slow, nuanced flow of Beautiful Dreamer though when it does feel like the film is trying to force the pace a little too much with an eye less on the authenticity of change and life experience it mostly embraces and more on narrative convenience.
This is particularly evident in the film’s final third when it tries to overstuff all kinds of entanglements, misunderstandings and revelations at the kind of pace that suggests a rush to tick a number of dramatic boxes whether the movie requires it or not.
One example of this is the way in which Billy and Sara try to hide the surrogacy from friends, but most importantly Sara’s mother Rita (Wendie Malick who chews up the scenery in the best possible way), in such a way that suggests they are going for some of richly silly comic moment.
But it simply ends up feeling a little clumsy in its execution, an unnecessary addition to the plot that the film would have well survived without; it doesn’t harm Beautiful Dreamer by its presence but you could have left it out and the film would’ve done just fine.
But this tendency to try to examine too much of life’s great swings and roundabouts, while evident throughout, doesn’t fatally affect Beautiful Dreamer which trades rather charmingly and with arch observation of the ethics of surrogacy, the necessity of feminism and a healthy queer soul that gives equal time to the veracity of both of its core relationships, and with an often wry eye at the way in which life rarely conforms to our expectations.
The truth of the matter is that change is always going to be with us and that life, wonderful though it might in its current iteration, is not going to stay that way forever and we can either go for it, messy execution and all, or fight it even if that effort will be wasted in the long run.
Beautiful Dreamer plumps for the former but with a keen eye on the flawed way any change makes its presence known, evoking a real sense of camaraderie and family throughout, reminding us that while everything around us may change, that who we are and who we love will likely endure if we have the presence of mind to make them the priority and not the accoutrements of living which in the end don’t matter as much as the people making them happen.