Andrea Arnold (2016)
In his interview with Andrea Arnold in Sight & Sound (October 2016), Simran Hans writes as follows:
‘Each film is kind of where my psyche is at the time, and often through each film I’m trying to work something out that I don’t fully understand,’ she tells me, but snaps shut when I press her on what she was trying to figure out while making American Honey. ‘I kind of know the answer to that but it’s so personal that I don’t know that I can actually say it,’ she says …
Arnold takes plenty of time to work out whatever she’s working out in American Honey: the film, at 163 minutes, is by some way the longest of her four features to date. (They’ve been getting progressively longer but her third feature, the adaptation of Wuthering Heights, was a good half-hour shorter than this new one.) American Honey is a rare spectacle but Arnold doesn’t tell us much more on screen than she does in interview. This, in combination with the greatly excessive length, makes the movie frustrating and a bit tiring to sit through.
Somewhere in Oklahoma, a teenage girl called Star (Sasha Lane) is in Walmart with two young children when she first sets eyes on Jake (Shia LaBeouf). He invites Star to join his ‘mag crew’: they travel from town to town, peddling magazine subscriptions from door to door. It’s not an irresistible offer and Star doesn’t accept immediately – but she is immediately taken by Jake’s edgy come-on and her life as it is hasn’t much to recommend it. In the opening scene of American Honey, Star and the two kids are seen retrieving a shrink-wrapped chicken from a dumpster. After the Walmart sequence, we see her at home being pawed by an older man, who may or may not be her father. Her young charges certainly aren’t Star’s kids: she returns them to their mother (who could also be Star’s mother) once she decides to go on the road with Jake and his colleagues.
Andrea Arnold goes along with them wholeheartedly. She is enraptured not only by American landscapes that she’s experiencing for the first time but also by the travelling cast of youngsters, most of whom have never acted in a film before. The newcomers include Sasha Lane, whom Arnold found ‘on a beach in Panama during spring break’, only a fortnight before the film went into production. (Arnold then tells Simran Hans in the S&S interview, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you what she was doing when I saw her’: American Honey really is a top-secret movie.) It’s not surprising that Lane caught Arnold’s eye. This twenty-year-old has an unusual beauty – big dark eyes, a thick, truculent upper lip that gives her a look that’s often challenging and sometimes vulnerable. Sasha Lane is a strong screen presence but it’s asking too much to expect her to carry this long film: a tyro actress, she doesn’t shape her performance and the director doesn’t help her in this. Andrea Arnold is so smitten with Lane and others as camera subjects that she seems to content just to watch. Her laissez-faire direction makes the acting of the more experienced members of the cast – Shia LaBeouf especially but also Riley Keough, as jealous, manipulative Krystal, who heads up the mag crew – look like overacting. Of the other first-timers, McCaul Lombardi makes the best impression, in the role of the sparky exhibitionist Corey.
Arnold’s script was inspired by an account that she read in the New York Times of kids living and working as the characters in American Honey do. Door-to-door selling isn’t, however, naturally conducive to exciting screen action: after Jake’s and Star’s opening pitch together, when he’s showing her the ropes, the film concentrates largely on the group dynamics and pecking order, on the erratic relationship between Star and Jake, and on Star’s brief encounters with a succession of other men. Arnold has an eye for arresting compositions but isn’t so good at placing them in believable contexts. The opening pitch is made at a house whose front door is opened by a pre-adolescent girl. She obviously likes the look of Jake. Her mother comes to the door to find out what’s going on and tells her to go back inside – to the friends that the girl has round. Her daughter promptly obeys. The mother (well played by Laura Kirk) is made fun of as a self-righteous Christian: the fun consists in Jake stealing from under her nose, and in the daughter and her friends dancing provocatively in the garden, as the mother yells at them in vain to stop. The dancing makes for a fine, comical image but it sharply contradicts, without explanation, the daughter’s doing as her mother tells her earlier in the scene. Besides, the Christian mother is too narrow-minded and too houseproud to have let a pair looking like Jake and Star over the threshold in the first place. (A female dance – this time cross-generational – was also a standout moment in Arnold’s second feature, Fish Tank: it made its point over-explicitly but at least it made sense.)
A more extended bit involves three Stetson-wearing, white-shirted, middle-aged men. They stop in their car just as Star is running away from Jake, after the pair have had a falling out. She accepts a lift from the cowboys and they take her back to a ranch. While they prepare a barbecue, Star drinks mezcal. She plunges into a swimming pool and gets one of the cowboys in the water too. Jake turns up with a gun to break up the party and steal the men’s car. This entire episode holds your attention: Arnold and her cinematographer Robbie Ryan keep up a flow of absorbing things to look at. The actors playing the Stetsons are good too but the writing of their roles is perfunctory. What is their motivation in picking Star up? They don’t obviously intend any harm. Richard Brody in the New Yorker says they get Star drunk but that’s misleading: she’s eager to drink and one of the men expresses concern at how much mezcal she’s downing. Star’s subsequent scenes in a passenger seat – first with a pleasant family-man trucker who gives her a lift, later with an oil-rig worker who pays her for sex – carry more tension and clearer meanings. But the cowboys seem to be in the film purely as facilitators of Arnold’s image-making.
Richard Brody is right enough when he takes Andrea Arnold to task for not giving the young characters of the story sufficient voice and for thereby perpetuating the:
‘… cliché that afflicts many movies about poor people … they’re depicted as being poor in language, poor in thought – as if people who don’t have money talk about their lives any less, or any less well, than people who do.’
As Brody says, Arnold opts in place of spoken words for sung ones: she pours pop and rock songs onto the soundtrack. When she talks vaguely in the S&S interview about ‘these kids coming from these fairly difficult backgrounds’, I assume Arnold’s referring to the kids she read about in the New York Times piece that was her starting point. She gives no idea in the film of how her characters have been marginalised, of whether this was the result of different factors in different cases.
Whatever those three aging cowboys may have had in mind, they observe Star’s behaviour at the ranch as if she was a curious new species. Sasha Lane does have an intriguing animal quality about her and the natural life of the landscapes through which the story moves is a powerful motif. A bear and a turtle both make important appearances; Jake does strategically-timed wolf impressions; but it’s the insect population that takes the lead. Star has a striking compassion for the bugs: not only would she not hurt a fly, she actually saves the life of a wasp. (Wasp was the title of Andrea Arnold’s first film, which won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short for 2005.) On the debit side, Star swallows the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle.
Robbie Ryan’s lighting gives the often-changing locale a consistent lustre and dynamism. Perhaps there’s more shaky hand-held camerawork than is necessary but the visuals are certainly American Honey‘s most eloquent feature. Arnold is so enthralled by the people and places she’s shooting that she gives an exultant charge to everything in the film: even that shrink-wrapped chicken has a weird vitality. In the closing minutes, Star walks into a lake and disappears under the water. She’s had such an up-and-down time over the previous two-and-a-half hours that you wouldn’t be astonished if she drowned herself – not least because this would be a way of Andrea Arnold finishing off the movie, which has been threatening never to finish. But – as in Red Road and Fish Tank – Arnold steps back from letting the worst happen. This seems less of an evasion than it was in the earlier pictures, thanks to American Honey‘s persistent joy-of-being-alive-and-young quality. Star emerges from the lake and we’re meant to conclude that she’s come of age. This was not a suicide but a baptism.
23 October 2016
