Film review

  • Beasts of the Southern Wild

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Benh Zeitlin (2012)

    There was a fair-sized audience for the show I saw and if Beasts of the Southern Wild is a box-office hit it will deserve its success – it’s a good film, although liable to be an overrated one, at least by critics.  What’s undoubtedly extraordinary about this first feature by Benh Zeitlin is that it’s an American film about Americans living in extreme material hardship.   Although the island in the movie, the ‘Isle de Charles Doucet’, is fictional, it’s inspired, according to Wikipedia, ’by several isolated and independent fishing communities threatened by erosion, hurricanes and rising sea levels in Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish, most notably the rapidly eroding Isle de Jean Charles’.   When I say the film is liable to be overrated by critics, I mean that, because the ‘Bathtub’ community of Beasts of the Southern Wild is based on real people in poverty, some will be wary of applying usual critical criteria to the movie.  In order to make the piece emotionally effective (which it certainly is), Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar, who co-wrote the film with him, have to focus on particular individuals within the community and the heroine, the young girl Hushpuppy, is uniquely independent-minded and courageous.  (The script is based on Alibar’s one-act stage play Juicy and Delicious but the material is evidently much changed:  the protagonist of Alibar’s play is a boy and the story is set in Georgia.)   In school, the Bathtub children learn about aurochs (prehistoric ancestors of cattle) and the film is named for these huge creatures, which are a recurring presence in the world on screen.  When Hushpuppy and some of the other girls (boys aren’t much in evidence at all) are returning from an expedition to a floating bar called the Elysian Fields, the aurochs encroach menacingly at their backs.  The other kids scream and flee but Hushpuppy stands her ground.  The beasts kneel and then withdraw.  Hushpuppy’s difference from the other children makes her a compelling focus for the film; it also makes it difficult, though, to see her capacity to survive and her passion for life as representative of the Bathtub community.

    The aurochs are frightening but admirable as they lumber across the landscape:  the way the beasts keep going turns them into an image of, as well as an apparent threat to, the resilient humans.  The aurochs are a triumph but, in other respects, Beasts of the Southern Wild is by no means free of cliché.  Aside from the relationship of Hushpuppy and her dying father, Wink, there aren’t many tensions within the Bathtub community, as if deprivation had got rid of that kind of thing.  A waitress on the Elysian Fields may be Hushpuppy’s mother and is certainly a golden-hearted whore.  Some of the plotting is primitive.  When Wink leads an escape from the shelter to which the Bathtub people have been evacuated, the authorities who sent them there are remarkably absent during a highly conspicuous great escape.   In her closing voiceover, Hushpuppy explains that ‘I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right’, a line which makes you think there must be more access to TV and movies on the Isle de Charles Doucet than you’d previously assumed.

    I can’t complain, however, if Beast of the Southern Wild gradually develops into a drama more conventional than it looks like being during its first half.  I preferred the human story to the fantastic, apocalyptic weather and geography – storms, hurricanes, the melting icecaps which release the aurochs back into nature.    The film has a fine score (by Dan Romer and Zeitlin) and images of beauty and brutality (photographed by Ben Richardson) – and Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy is amazing.  She’s just turned nine now but was only five when she auditioned for the part.  Although she’s very natural, Benh Zeitlin gets a real performance from Wallis:  this isn’t simple observation of a non-professional.  It’s an obvious thing to say but she does suggest a person old beyond her years (even if Hushpuppy’s well-formed philosophy of life is hard to explain).  She’s brilliant at being open and, when something’s too painful, at shutting off through a light going down in her eyes.  Dwight Henry as the handsome, volatile Wink is over-dynamic at first but the two build a strong connection and Henry, who had also never acted professionally before, is increasingly expressive as he quietens down.   At the end of Wink’s life, the memory of his kinetic qualities earlier on is touching.

    25 October 2012

     

     

  • BBC Children’s TV Archive Rarities from the 50s and 60s

    Old YorkerFilm review

    British Film Institute (2014[1])

    The BFI programme guide for this month introduces this compilation as follows:

    ‘To complement the BBC poll celebrating the Greatest Children’s TV Characters … we present this vintage cornucopia of oddities and rarities featuring the monochrome-era stars of BBC Children’s TV such as:  Muffin the Mule, Andy Pandy, Bill and Ben and Sooty.  We will also include clips, news items, tributes and rare, behind the scenes footage of many TV favourites.  It may be easy to imagine we’re travelling back to a less noisy time of simpler pleasures, but from a modern perspective some of this material – though undeniably nostalgic – is also decidedly surreal!  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then we’ll begin …’

    An introductory paragraph in the programme note for yesterday’s screening echoed this, also promising ‘rare and precious pieces of archive, most of which have not been seen since their original broadcasts’ and ‘some surprises along the way’.

    If the BFI were subject to the Trade Descriptions Act then the actual show would, in most respects, render them liable to prosecution.  At least it was accurate in promising surprises.  The chasmal discrepancy between the richness of the BFI’s film resources and its organisational ineptitude grows wider still and wider.  The ‘rare and precious pieces of archive’ included:  a long clip from an ITV feature of the mid-1980s about the history of Sooty on television, introduced by Janet Brown impersonating Mrs Thatcher and including extracts from the colour programmes broadcast by ITV after Harry Corbett and Sooty migrated from the BBC; items from Blue Peter (with Simon Groom, Janet Ellis and Peter Duncan, so late 1970s or 1980s), John Craven’s Newsround and something with Sally James and a male presenter whom I didn’t recognise – all three of these items were about children’s television history and their content overlapped hugely (exactly the same clip from The Flower Pot Men appeared at least three times); a sketch from a Morecambe and Wise show from 1973 with Eric in a Sooty costume; and a facetious piece from Did You See? – fronted by Ludovic Kennedy, so I guess from the 1980s – with Emma Freud ‘in search of the flower pot men’ (this included cartoon drawings with tedious knowing captions – Bill and Ben urging ‘Legalise pot now’ and so on).  I stayed until the end of the screening and the start of a warm round of applause.   I guess many people in NFT2 last night would see my criticisms as nitpicking but I think the show was a disgrace and the epitome of much of what’s wrong with BFI.   Those who threw it together did so safe in the knowledge that the audience would comprise plenty of people who remembered children’s television in its early years and whose feelings of nostalgic goodwill towards it would be strong enough to protect BFI from criticism of shortcomings in the planning and execution of what was screened.

    This lazy and complacent approach was evident from the start.  A man introduced the show.   He warned there would be some short breaks between clips as the reels were changed.  He also acknowledged that the programme note didn’t give any details of the various source materials – if anyone in the audience was interested in this information they should let him know and he would supply it ‘by email or snail mail’.  This sounded like a poor use of his time – relative to including details in the note in the first place – if he had any takers.  Of course, there was little danger of that since he didn’t say who he was.  He did, however, introduce Isabel Ryan, daughter of John Ryan, the creator of Captain Pugwash:  she would show us some original artwork from the series, at various stages of its television life.  Isabel Ryan held up the first, black-and-white illustration:  ‘I hope you can all see it’.  A chorus of nos but this didn’t bother the BFI’s man with no name and she carried on, pretty pointlessly – although she did at least explain that it was possible to view a large store of artwork in the BFI archive at Berkhamsted.  If the organisers of the show thought it worth getting Isabel Ryan along to present this material, why didn’t they make the effort to get images of the artwork projected in a way that allowed them to be seen?

    There was plenty of material of intrinsic historical interest and which was entertaining too during the next hour and threequarters (there was no indication in the programme note even of the running time).  It was good to find the extracts of Sooty and Sweep and Harry Corbett so funny.  There were wearying references in the interview clips etc in Archive Rarities to Corbett having his hand up Sooty’s bum:  it puzzled me a bit that the NFT2 audience laughed so readily at this, in view of what’s been coming to light about some other family entertainers of the past.  Fortunately, admiration for Corbett’s skill – how emotionally expressive and amusing he makes Sooty – overcame the uneasy, tedious retrospective jokes  The Muffin the Mule material, although poorly organised within the compilation, included two thirds of a short documentary for BBC children’s television about the production of a book to accompany the series.  (It was explained that the other third no longer existed.)  I’d not realised before how likeable Muffin is:  part of his appeal must have been his excitable jigging about – when he skitters towards Annette Mills over her piano lid, he’s a child eager to get a grown up’s attention.  Mills’s songs are rather dreary but Muffin’s personality more than compensates.  I didn’t know or had forgotten that Mills died suddenly at the height of the show’s success (in early 1955); the BBC’s decision to discontinue it after her death must have left an awful lot of parents with some difficult explaining to their children to do.  A special programme to mark the first decade of BBC children’s television, featuring a return appearance from Muffin in an encounter with Sooty, was a real highlight.  Ann Hogarth, who, with her husband Jan Bussell, created Muffin (although the name came from Annette Mills) and pulled his strings, gives an interesting interview.  So does Audrey Atterbury, best known for her work in Andy Pandy (the title character’s appearance is alleged to have been inspired by her son, Paul Atterbury, now a stalwart of Antiques Roadshow), but also a puppeteer on The Flower Pot Men and The Woodentops.

    The most admirable behind-the-scenes contributor, though, is Peter Hawkins (1924-2006), the voice of, among others, Bill and Ben, the Pugwash characters and (although it wasn’t mentioned here) the Daleks in the early years of Doctor Who.  In the course of Archive Rarities, Hawkins has to put up with clumsy questions from Simon Groom and patronising treatment from – in ascending order of offensiveness – Sally James, Janet Ellis and Emma Freud.  Thanks to BFI’s sloppy compilation, Hawkins can’t help repeating himself but he keeps his temper and explains his craft – and demonstrates his considerable talent – with clarity, wit and charm.   I felt grateful to Peter Hawkins especially for letting me come out of the screening with something better than fury with the BFI in my heart.

    18 July 2014

    [1] This compilation appears to have no IMDB listing.

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