Review by Pamela Zoslov
Benh Zeitlin's BEASTS OF THE
SOUTHERN WILD, a magical-realist
indie drama set in the post-Katrina southern Louisiana bayou, has
been lavished with critical praise. “One of the most auspicious
American directorial debuts in years,” raved the Toronto Globe
and Mail's Liam Lacey. The film
won the Palm D'Or at Cannes and a top prize at Sundance.
It is certainly an
impressive film, and original enough to merit admiration. Using a
cast of non-professional actors and sets built by cast and crew,
Zeitlin has created an original experience and, most memorably, an
unusual heroine in Hushpuppy, the wild-haired tomboy played with
gritty intensity by newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis. The film's strength,
however, lies more in its aesthetics than its narrative, which is
less than completely satisfying.
The story is
loosely based on a play by co-scenarist Lucy Alibar. It centers on
six-year-old Hushpuppy, who lives in squalid conditions in a place
they call “The Bathtub” – modeled on the Isle de Jean Charles –
with her irascible father, Wink (Dwight Henry). She evokes her mother, who "swam away," by talking to an old discarded basketball jersey (LeBron's No.
23, I believe -- so that's where those went). The Bathtub is portrayed as a kind
of primitive utopia, where the inhabitants drink, laugh, celebrate
and eat crawfish with their hands while chanting “Beast it! Beast
it!” Hushpuppy has a rough, Huck Finn quality – at one point,
Wink exhorts her to flex her muscular little arms: “Show me your
guns!” Later, we see her unwillingly outfitted in a little girl's
dress with a lace collar, and it looks somehow wrong.
A coming storm
threatens the existence of The Bathtub residents' ramshackle idyll. A
teacher warns Hushpuppy and the island's other children about the
impending climate disaster that will melt the icecaps, unleashing from
the glaciers herds of aurochs, fierce, extinct bisons that in this film
are a metaphor for the forces of inexorable change that
Hushpuppy must combat. Her point of view, improbably mature and
philosophical, is presented in voice-over narration. “The whole
universe depends on everything fitting together just right,” she
says, like a Tao master.
Hushpuppy is also
doing battle against personal loss, and her awareness that her father
is suffering from some unspecified grave illness. The lifestyle
portrayed is quite strange. For some reason, father and daughter live
in separate “houses,” really just improvised shanties. When the
floods come, they take refuge in their “boat,” really a
re-purposed pickup truck bed. Wink is gruff and sometimes outright
mean – in one of the film's more human moments, Hushpuppy shouts at
him in retaliation, “I hope you die and after you die, I'll go to
your grave and eat birthday cake all by myself!”
Echoing the story
of the Katrina floods, BEASTS celebrates the idea of
self-sufficiency, as the Bathtub residents resist ordinary society's
attempts to get them to vacate the dangerous flood area. “Daddy
says brave men don't run from their home,” Hushpuppy says in
narration.
The movie's
marriage of folklore – the special-effects aurochs that move
through the landscape – and the realistic story of a poor but proud
Bayou family – is not an entirely happy one. The human story is
drowned in the floodwaters of Zeitlin's folkloric impulse. The story
of a motherless little girl whose father is
dying, and the stories of poor people whose lives are wrecked by
disasters like Katrina, should be poignant, yet here it is curiously
unmoving. The problem is that these are not human characters, just
literary conceits.
Still, there is
much to embrace in BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD:
the originality of its concept, the textured, painterly
cinematography of Ben Richardson, the unsentimental portrait of poor,
hardscrabble lives, and above all, a remarkable young heroine in
Quvenzhané Wallis' Hushpuppy. 3 out of 4 stars.
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