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