Directed by: Jody Shapiro.
You probably know the
face of Burt Shavitz, even if you haven’t heard the name. His face is, after
all, on all kinds of products in the Burt`s Bees line of natural skin care and
other product, made out of beeswax. Burt`s Buzz is a documentary that wants to
go behind the logo, and get to know the man behind it. He was once a talented
professional photographer, working for magazines in New York, but he gave that
up, moved to upstate New York, and eventually the Maine and starting raising
bees – and selling their honey. He meets a woman, and for a while they seem
like they may end up getting married. She starts to make other products out of
the beeswax, and soon sales start going up, and they expand their operation.
Burt would have you believe that he is just a simple man – one who doesn’t want
very much out of life, never wanted to become a brand, and doesn’t much care
about money or the company that he was eventually forced out of – a move that
cost him hundreds of millions of dollars. Much of that is probably true. But
watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think that Burt wasn’t telling the
entire truth, and he is molding the story to suit the version of himself he
wants the world to see. There are holes and cracks in his story – ones that the
movie doesn’t seem too interested in exploring. The movie purports to be an
examination of Burt – an ornery man who lives like he wants, and says what he
wants, and rejects out materialistic culture. That wasn’t the impression that I
got from the movie.
The hole in the movie is
that Burt’s former partner doesn’t appear in the movie at all, except in
snippets from a TV program called “How I Made My Millions”. The parts of the
story that we get from Burt feel incomplete, and one-sided, and the movie fails
to explore what really happened when the pair split, and she forced him out of
the company. Nor does the movie explore the inherent contradiction in Burt, who
claims he doesn’t care about the money or the company, but isn’t above going to
Target as a spokesman for the brand – or on a longer trip to Taiwan to do the
same (I assume he’s now an employed spokesperson for the company, although
curiously, the movie doesn’t say). He claims he doesn’t care about money – but late
in the movie he tells the woman responsible for his Taiwan trip that he enjoyed
it, but he wouldn’t do it for free.
Throughout the movie, I
kept thinking that Burt Shavitz was a more complicated person than the movie
makes him out to be. Perhaps director Jody Shapiro wanted to make a more
complex portrait of the man, but was stymied by Shavitz, who doesn’t seem
overly interested in the interviews, and the fact his former partner wasn’t there.
I kept thinking that this could be a fascinating documentary if it had pushed
harder, and went further, but that as it stands it doesn’t do either. Instead,
what we’re left with is a rather shallow portrait of a man who is more complex
than the movie shows – and more complex than Shavitz wants to appear to be.
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