Beasts of the Southern Wild

The winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year, Benh Zeitlin’s directorial debut Beasts of the Southern Wild is a deeply eccentric, strikingly immediate story of life and loss in the flooded wastelands of post-Katrina New Orleans. Adapted by Zeitlin’s artistic collective Court 13 from a one-act play by co-writer Lucy Alibar, played by an amateur cast (who also built the sets) and shot on grainy, hand-held 16mm film, Beasts has a charmingly home-made, half-baked aesthetic that, unfortunately, also carries over into the ill-considered narrative.

Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl played with extraordinary courage and tenacity by Quvenzhané Wallis, lives with her alcoholic father, Wink (Dwight Henry) in “The Bathtub,” a flooded Delta community at the edge of civilisation. Hushpuppy is the film’s heroine, a cross between a mini-Mad Max and the biblical Eve, whose whispered voice-over fills us in on her shattered family life, their hardscrabble existence and her sustained belief in magic, despite her father’s tough-love teachings about survival. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness that turns his veins black under his skin, nature itself seems to fall out of synchronicity. A great flood arrives, sinking The Bathtub, the tumbling clouds cause the temperature to rise and, somewhere far distant, the ice-caps melt unleashing a herd of prehistoric pig-like creatures called Aurochs. As the waters rise, and her father slowly succumbs, Hushpuppy goes in search of her long-lost mother and a new home.

But there’s comes a point, about half way through, when it becomes clear that the inhabitants of The Bathtub aren’t the straggled survivors of some apocalyptic disaster, living in a post-industrial Eden of their own assembly, but rather a band of people who choose to live apart from the rest of the world. While the “beasts” commitment to their home and community is touching, and touchingly played, the subsequent story is constructed around their naïve determination to live as Rousseau’s ‘noble savages’, eschewing the medical and social assistance they so desperately need and actively asking the audience to root against the faceless people that offer help. Over time, a desperate cuteness soaks into the film as Zeitlin strains to avoid even the most obvious social comment while having his characters run around in rags in a devastated world where alcohol is the only currency.

Zeitlin does get an extraordinarily self-assured performance from young Wallis (expect her to be nominated for an Academy Award in January) but his Malick-like evocation of natural poetry and magic realism don’t sit comfortably with the realistic depiction of grinding poverty and blackout-chasing alcoholism. Characters that we have come to care for, Hushpuppy in particular, are abandoned as the story sidelines into condescending clichés about ragged people struggling against 'the man' for the right to return to their home. The photography is sensitive and immersive, the soaring score is bouncing and playful but no amount of atmospherics and lighting can fill the gaping hole where a fully-formed story should be. By the time that the Pied Piper Hushpuppy leads a ragged parade of her friends and neighbours holding sparkling fireworks, the film has become little more than a sustained round of applause for its own loose, improvised novelty.

2 comments:

clom said...

I'm not sure I agree.

It's by no means perfect, it's syrupy and the evac/detention scene seems to exist exclusively to deliver the line about the centre "looking like a fishtank with all the water drained out of it."

But there's a lot here that's pretty great, I think they effectively deploy the alcoholism and violence to evoke a more realistic portrait of parent/child dynamics than a lot of more consciously realistic (and didactic) portrayals of abuse. Hushpuppy loves her Dad but is hypervigilant, stressed and distrustful being raised in an environment where she can't predict what's going to happen next. This is the shallow end of neglect/abuse and an ambient reality for millions of children living in poverty. They're not being badly abused and their abusers aren't monsters but it's happening and it's refreshing to see a portrayal of it that attempts to view it through a childs perspective.

I think the themes of flight, exclusion, catastrophe and survival are pretty major ones in a lot of American writing at the moment and seem to be more interesting meditations on what the next 20 years are going to look like than a lot of metropolitan movies concerned with finance/government.

It's not a realist movie and the socio-political issues are painted on as background, this worked because it doesn't overpower the human drama and for a lot of excluded people the socio-political conditions are remote, arbitrary and threatening, especially for children. It's really well shot and close enough to give the sense that the people are part of the landscape rather than moving within it.

There are major missteps and I personally think it's abusive to have nominated a child that young for Best Actress but I think it's an interesting, thought provoking and ambitious movie.

clom said...

I'm not sure I agree.

It's by no means perfect, it's syrupy and the evac/detention scene seems to exist exclusively to deliver the line about the centre "looking like a fishtank with all the water drained out of it."

But there's a lot here that's pretty great, I think they effectively deploy the alcoholism and violence to evoke a more realistic portrait of parent/child dynamics than a lot of more consciously realistic (and didactic) portrayals of abuse. Hushpuppy loves her Dad but is hypervigilant, stressed and distrustful being raised in an environment where she can't predict what's going to happen next. This is the shallow end of neglect/abuse and an ambient reality for millions of children living in poverty. They're not being badly abused and their abusers aren't monsters but it's happening and it's refreshing to see a portrayal of it that attempts to view it through a childs perspective.

I think the themes of flight, exclusion, catastrophe and survival are pretty major ones in a lot of American writing at the moment and seem to be more interesting meditations on what the next 20 years are going to look like than a lot of metropolitan movies concerned with finance/government.

It's not a realist movie and the socio-political issues are painted on as background, this worked because it doesn't overpower the human drama and for a lot of excluded people the socio-political conditions are remote, arbitrary and threatening, especially for children. It's really well shot and close enough to give the sense that the people are part of the landscape rather than moving within it.

There are major missteps and I personally think it's abusive to have nominated a child that young for Best Actress but I think it's an interesting, thought provoking and ambitious movie.