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Beasts of the Southern Wild is a peculiar animal; a
beast, if you will. The film’s director, Benh Zeitlin, is an avant-garde
filmmaker, if there ever was one. He reportedly never looked at the film’s
dailies until after they were finished with the entire movie and even prefers
his crew to learn “on the job”. His technique may be (read: is) quite
unorthodox, but whatever works, right? With Beasts of the Southern Wild,
Zeitlin’s approach manages to work more often than it doesn’t.
The film utilizes a heavy amount of documentary-style, reportage
camera work and narration, which deftly relates the film to memories of
Post-Hurricane Katrina Louisiana, even as the story’s origin had nothing to do
with Hurricane Katrina or even Louisiana. The film is adapted from a play
called Juicy and Delicious, which is about a young boy and his father in
Southern Georgia. The play was adapted by Zeitlin and its writer Lucy Alibar;
the two of them were old friends and decided to make their first film together.
I tell you all of this because I think it explains
everything I feel about this film. Juicy and Delicious was written by a
woman (Alibar) struggling to deal with the fact that her father was sick;
thusly, it came from an incredibly authentic place (Note: I haven’t seen or
read the play, but I’ve read Alibar’s words on why she wrote it.). Why, you may
ask, was the film set in Louisiana, if the play was set in Georgia? Well, the
answer is that Zeitlin wanted to
make a film set in Louisiana. That’s it; that’s how the film feels, to me: it
feels like someone wanted to make a film set in Louisiana.
What I mean by that is the film’s relentless cinema verite
pursuit for Americana undercuts the humanity of its story and its central
father-child relationship. As much as I admire the director’s feel for the
aesthetic and appreciate his desire to examine an almost fantastical
environment, I can’t divorce that from feeling the film forcing on me that it
was playing a game of hide-and-seek with reality.
There were two things this film reminded me of while I
watched it: the film The Tree of Life, and the book Nine Lives:
Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans. If you’ve seen The Tree
of Life, then you’re already aware of the similarities: they’re both
chimerical allegories on the difficulty of dealing with loss and a father who
doesn’t know how to love. As for Nine Lives, it is also written with an
air of reportage storytelling and, unlike Beasts of the Southern Wild,
it actually is about Post-Katrina New Orleans (and Pre-Katrina New Orleans);
that fact, for me, is likely why Nine Lives is awash with authenticity,
set within a world of the compulsory believability that Beasts of a Southern
Wild simply can’t muster.
However, the film’s look is exceptional and the two main
characters are endearing. Which brings me to the absolute best thing about Beasts
of the Southern Wild: Quvenzhane Wallis, who stars as Hushpuppy, the young
girl charged with surviving the symbolic bull running through the china shop of
her life. Wallis turns in an inimitable performance and undeniably steals the
entire film; she rightfully earned the designation of “youngest ever to be
nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress”. Through the film’s flaws,
which I feel I’ve adequately enumerated, Wallis carries you to the finish line;
when the cartoonish caricatures subside and the moral of the story approaches,
the character of Hushpuppy--and Wallis’ portrayal thereof-- looks you dead in
the face and forces you to care immensely for her journey toward the acceptance
of life.
-John
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