Beasts of the Southern Wild, 12a cert, 93min - review

The defiant spirit of southern Louisiana - and of one little girl, especially - shines through in a fantasy adventure of tragedy and triumph in the wake of eco-disaster
in Beasts of the Southern Wild
1 March 2014

If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the war, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.” Thus Kingsley Amis in Jake’s Thing. He may not have much enjoyed Beasts of the Southern Wild, I suspect.

It’s meant as a celebration of the defiant spirit of the poorest people in the bayous of southern Louisiana, still surviving after Hurricane Katrina and the oil-spill, facing up to an uncertain future. But this is a film which is ultimately as much about the process of its own making as anything else, like certain Werner Herzog movies.

The young New York-born, college-educated director Benh Zeitlin, now resident in New Orleans, is the co-founder of a funky film-making collective there called Court 13, dedicated to “making films about communities as a community”. This is Court 13’s first feature and it has already won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival and the Caméra d’Or for best first film at Cannes.

Beasts of the Southern Wild loosely adapts a play, Juicy and Delicious, by Zeitlin’s friend Lucy Alibar, about a boy losing his father at the end of the world. In a remote wetland community called the Bathtub, a captivatingly bold little girl, Hushpuppy, lives in a wrecked trailer, near the shed inhabited by her erratic dad, Wink, a wild drunk, her mother having long disappeared. Surrounded by animals, they make do without any help from the city beyond the levee. The first half-hour of the film, just going into this world (“the prettiest place on earth” to Hushpuppy) without any explanation, taking it as a given, is astonishingly powerful and demanding, delivering an America never seen before on screen.

Then there’s a great storm (perhaps actually Katrina?) and the Bathtub is flooded and poisoned. Meanwhile, as part of the general catastrophe of global warming, fierce prehistoric beasts called aurochs are being released from the melting ice caps and coming back to menacing life.

Taking to a homemade raft, Hushpuppy and Wink must rely on their own tenacity for survival — but Wink is already dying of a blood disease. The government forcibly evacuates the people of the Bathtub and puts Hushpuppy and Wink in a sterile and cheerless hospital — but they break out and return to their home, to confront whatever’s coming.

The filming style is rough and low quality, the camera never steady, while the acting too draws on the emphatic authenticity of those involved more than any ability to impersonate or project. Local people, not professional actors, were cast, and genuine locations in the bayou chosen, all on a small budget.

As Hushpuppy, the then six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, apparently cast only after 4,000 other kids had been auditioned, is a terrific presence — a fierce starer and glarer, so intent, easily holding the screen, despite her diminutive stature. She doesn’t act, she just appears as herself, an extraordinary child. Dwight Henry, a New Orleans baker, isn’t quite a match for her as Wink, a brooding and angry figure, first reeling around and shouting, then prostrated and coughing.

The action, such as it is, proceeds by a series of setpieces — a wild party to celebrate survival, a visit to a dreamlike floating bordello where Hushpuppy hopes to find her mother, the coming of the aurochs. Some of these scenes feel like a workshop on parade, gleefully acting up, often to great music.

Hushpuppy herself supplies a defiant voiceover, very much in the style of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right,” she says, in case we hadn’t picked up the eco-theme. She listens to the very heartbeats of the natural world, holding a chick or a crab to her ear like a phone. At the end, she bravely announces: “I see that I’m a little piece of a big, big universe and that makes things all right.”

Sentimentality is not avoided then — and the entire thread of the coming of the aurochs, climaxing in these giant hogs bending the knee to dauntless Hushpuppy and being told “you’re my friends, kind of”, is a miscalculation (as well as being dreadfully unfair to the aurochs, a great big wild cow, exquisitely depicted in the parietal art of Chauvet and Lascaux, only hunted to extinction in the 17th century, immortalised by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita — “I am thinking of aurochs and angels...”).

This film is an expression of love and admiration for the hard-pressed people of the bayou and their refusal to give up their way of life, even after environmental catastrophe. It’s a deliberate retort to the image the news reports gave of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, all looting and social breakdown. Full of energy and humour, it successfully creates a world — one that could be somewhere in the far future rather than in Louisiana now — from the scrappiest ingredients. It’s something new, something different. Lots of reviewers have proclaimed it the indie triumph of the year.

But it doesn’t ultimately make any sense at all and, for me, its charm wasn’t enough to sustain the whole ramshackle structure. Second time around, it slumped. Never mind the blithe incoherencies (where do they get all that drink? and the gas? did one garfish packed with explosive really blow up the levee? where did the water go? how really do they live? how did those aurochs get there anyway?). The eco-piety and ethno-patronage became too much for me. For others, though, they may be the very essence.

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