Beth + Jeremy and Steve

A mid-thirties married woman starts an ill-advised affair with a teenage boy in an attempt to see if she still has a lust for life left within her, all the while completely unaware that her husband has been on their trail the entire time.

Beth (Ratterman) isn’t getting on well with her husband, Steve (Dibasio). They argue constantly over the little things and they just can’t seem to get on the same page with anything. Whenever they try to face the big stuff and talk about what’s wrong with their relationship, Steve lies or avoids the issue, and Beth can’t herself answer any of the questions she’s asking of him. Simultaneously, Jeremy (Friedman) is busy getting friendzoned by his high-school dating partner as she moves on to pastures new, and he begins to wonder if he comes up to scratch as suitable boyfriend material. What better time, then, for a meet-cute in a Portland indie record store?

As their eyes meet over the stacks of vinyl, Beth approaches Jeremy and acts all coy about getting back into something she thought she gave up on a long time ago. She makes it clear that she’s just into him because of his arty nature and their shared interest in retro style and music, and that she doesn’t want to jump his bones in any way – besides she’s married and he’s in high-school. So now that they both know that, there’ll be no opportunity for shenanigans or naked jiggy-jiggy time. And yet…

Glossing over the fact that Beth is in actuality committing statutory rape in the state of Oregon, writer and director Daniel Hill goes right on with letting the relationship flourish before any consequences are met. Then, when these consequences do come, they don’t come from the state or federal law, but from Steve himself, who has suspected Beth of cheating on him and has started following her around. What follows is a strange game of cat-and-mouse as Steve gets himself firmly in the middle of Beth and Jeremy’s love affair, tagging along as a third-wheel on some occasions, and asking some pretty fetishistic questions about what they’re getting up to.

This up-ending of the social narrative in this menage-a-trois is what’s supposed to give Beth + Jeremy and Steve it’s edge, however, it in reality only serves to mock the sincerity of the drama played out in the earlier stages of the film, before Steve bulldozes in with his strangely psychopathic ways. The real meat-and-potatoes of the relationship comes from when Beth and Jeremy are getting to know each other, bonding over music and sharing a zest for living in much the same way as Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days Of Summer (2009). The music takes on a thematic importance between the two and their relationship gets mapped out to the background tones of some pretty nifty indie tracks, with the songs blending seamlessly into the narrative of the film in a manner akin to Cameron Crowe’s best.

The acting, too, along with the script-writing, is at its best when it’s between Beth and Jeremy. Briana Ratterman does an exceptional job of relaying the awkward coquettishness of an older woman seducing a younger man for the first time, and she is always natural and believable in every scene she’s in. Matthew Dibiasio also works hard to put in a good performance as the calmly unhinged Steve, however, he is let down by some inconsistent characterisation as well as a fairly clouded motivation. It’s obvious he’s some kind of pervert underneath it all, getting some sick satisfaction from controlling the affair from the outside, but it’s never really explained why he’s so weird, and weirdly okay with the way things are.

At all times it’s clear with Beth + Jeremy and Steve that we’re watching an indie movie. All of the technical aspects are well handled, especially the aforementioned music and sound design, but there’s an economy to everything else that keeps the story so self-contained that it seems there’s not a wider world outside of the ken of the three main characters. This is a solid feature debut from writer/director Daniel Hill, but at no point does it jump the rope to reach the heights of something more. The story, in the end, turns out to be pretty banal, and despite the sometime characterisation of ‘crazy’ Steve, the denouement leaves the characters exactly where you’d expect them to be at the end of it all.

For all that, Beth + Jeremy and Steve does intrigue for the first two acts, and Steve aside, the portrayal of actual, real-life, insecure people, getting themselves into relationships they know are a bad idea, is so well handled, that it’s a tonic to the dog-whistle modern-day sexual politics of something like the disappointingly bad, Babygirl (2024), which offers similar situations but from a wholly unrealistic and fantastical viewpoint. Beth + Jeremy and Steve is two-thirds of a good movie, but lacks the teeth to be anything more, when in the end nobody really learns anything and not that much changes in their lives once it’s all over.