With its leafy aesthetic, its portrayal of the human in relationship and in resistance to nature, and a major claim for cinematic realism, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild is eventually less than the sum of its parts. There are only so many times the camera can linger on a young girl’s face or glide restlessly across the trees before I realised that the film is not at all the masterpiece much loved by many, but rather a fetishisation of the child’s role in a nature myth. I had a similar experience with Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s tedious child fantasy movie, and like that film, Beasts feels at once strangely overlong and underwritten.
Six-year old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) are residents of the Bathtub, a community of normative exiles gathered on an island just off the New Orleans coast, hidden (so they think) behind the levees that separate civilisation from their community. Some reviewers suggest that the characters here are people who are close to nature - and in the film’s beautiful opening scene, Hushpuppy makes that impression utterly vivid – but often they are simply drunk. Hushpuppy’s mother left a long time ago, and Wink, prone to moments of abuse as much as misguided care where he masculinises his young daughter, isn’t a consistently attentive father. Then Hushpuppy hears about global warming, and imagines mythical aurochs breaking free from the ice caps to walk the earth. When flooding becomes a very real threat to the Bathtub, Hushpuppy will be more reliant on one another than ever before, whether Wink is prepared for it or not.
Riding waves of acclaim all the way from Sundance earlier this year, the film drifts from one scene to the next until it all finally ends in the way you exactly suspected it would. The notion of death is introduced early on, and the film does little that is creative in its approach to the theme. In addition, the Bathtub community is uninteresting and the story gives the characters very little to do, with Zeitlin milking Willis’s young face for effect in reaction shot after reaction shot. Using a child protagonist to frame the story (complete with some voice over narration) is a tricky business at the best of times, and yet some majestic films have opened up the world through children’s eyes: The 400 Blows, City of God, Cinema Paradiso. In Beasts, Willis’s face simply becomes the emotional crux of the film. Both Willis and Henry, who runs a bakery and here makes his debut, give solid performances and share at least one riveting, emotional scene that involves more than just Hushpuppy’s wide eyes.
Beasts is also one of those films that mistakes “immediacy” for “hand held camera”. The one does not by default imply the other. Filmic immersion is earned through character, not waving a camera around and seeing what you come up with. I wanted to grab Zeitlin by his neck and say: stop moving. Put down your camera. Show me what’s worth seeing so that it’s clear, not fuzzy; located, not dizzy. Beyond its truly superlative first five to ten minutes, the film never conveys what is apparently so fascinating about the world and its inhabitants. While the ending also has some emotional resonance, the hour in between is dreary filmmaking.
I’m not angry at the film like bell hooks is. (hooks calls the film racist, and amongst other things, the pornography of poverty as shot by a privileged white male.) I clearly don’t think it’s a total failure on the scale of the despicable Precious, and I don’t get a strong sense of exploitation from the film. That said, I strongly agree with MUBI’s Vishnevetsky who perfectly problematizes the film’s world view, which is where my problem with the film is located: “Beasts pretends to be celebrating gumption and resolve, but what it's ultimately selling is stubbornness and isolationism. There is a word for films like this: bullshit” (author's italics).
With all its chickens, trees, alcoholics, home-made boats and the thematically redundant aurochs, Beasts of the Southern Wild mostly left me cold. It is a profound disappointment. Those who praise the film would do well to seek out Bahrani’s vastly superior Chop Shop.
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