“Hello, Bookstore.” That’s how Matthew Tannenbaum answers the phone a dozen times a day at his independent bookshop in Lenox, Massachusetts, always with the same gentle, curious voice. (He’s an old hippy; you could imagine him played by Mark Rylance in the movie of his life.)
Booklovers will instantly feel at home in this documentary and in Tannenbaum’s store – a warm inviting hang-out, a little shabby with comfy armchairs to settle down in, children curled up on the floor noses in books. It’s clearly a bookshop full of discoveries, one of those you pop into for a browse and walk out lugging a carrier bag full of books. There’s even a wine bar in the corner, Get Lit, opened by Tannenbaum in memory of a wine-loving Czech friend who’d escaped the Nazis, then lived to the age of 90.
The unhurried fly-on-the-wall film-making here – a little in the style of Frederick Wiseman – captures the gentle rhythms and flow of life in the store. There’s a stool on the customer side of the till. Tannenbaum seems to spend chunks of the day sat down chatting about books and life with his regulars. He’s not remotely standoffish, just as happy to find someone a “page turner” as a work of earth-shattering literature. His two adult daughters stop by with lunch in Tupperwares. We learn that he raised them as a single dad after his wife died when they were little; all the love, care – and food – is coming right back to him now that they are grown up.
The store is Tannenbaum’s life but it doesn’t make a penny. One of his employees, a guy in his 20s, gently wonders if there is a better way to deal with the invoices landsliding over the desk in the office. “An app or something?” he suggests; Tannebaum smiles wryly. “Conceivably there is a better way to run a business.”
Film-maker Adam Zax had started filming when Covid hit, providing some genuine jeopardy here as The Bookstore starts tanking – only making in a week what it had previously pulled in on a single day. The happy ending is a GoFundMe to save the business that reaches its $60,000 goal in 23 hours. It’s the only documentary I’ve ever watched with a reading list in the credits – what a treat this film is.
