Aspiring to a ragged sort of transcendence, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a rare creative gesture, an ambitious slice of magic realism which is spoilt by an overeager desire to manufacture pathos. Set amidst a post-Katrina community in southern Louisiana – ‘the Bathtub’ – the film unfurls from the viewpoint of its diminutive heroine, six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a naïf effect that desperately evokes Days of Heaven but feels more akin to an episode of Kids Say The Funniest Things. The result is an altogether too user-friendly walk on the wild side, a film of surfaces that pretends to emotional and spiritual depths.
As Hushpuppy surveys her fragile web of living with an insatiable curiosity, she converts environmental catastrophe into a wider allegorical struggle for sense of self and place: the harsh beauty of the natural world is forever juxtaposed with the sterile, controlled environment of modern civilisation (“Ain’t that ugly over there?” says Hushpuppy’s father pointing out the power plants on the horizon, lest we miss the point.) By projecting her coming-of-age onto this austere landscape, Behn Zeitlin estranges the personal from the person, which in a film with already scant characterisation is nothing if not off-putting. Less a paradise of self-sufficiency than a haven for unrepentant alcoholics, Hushpuppy becomes the poster child of the Bathtub’s rugged individualism (“brave men stay and watch it happen… they don’t run,” she stubbornly says about an approaching storm, having taken part in a particularly unhelpful neo-Luddite detonation of a neighbouring levee).
Adopting a distinct us-versus-them stance, there is something rather uncomfortable in how Behn Zeitlin revives tired notions about the untutored wisdom and moral superiority of the ‘noble savage’. The film fetishizes poverty to the point at which being broke is roughly equivalent to a state of grace, painting the isolated marshland as an enchanted locale of subalternity where daily activities are abnormally heightened experiences. What is sacred and what is humble in a world where sucking the fresh meat out of sea crabs functions as a quasi-Eucharistic sacrament? It seems as though Zeitlin is yet another indie director who finds it hard to imagine a pudding can ever be over-egged.
The faux-documentary style, shifting between off-centre compositions and restless tracking shots, gives a dynamic agency to such neorealist skits – most successful in the film’s blistering prologue, a bacchanalia replete with carnival races, zydeco-inflected music and sparklers in the night – but it all feels too manifestly and knowingly stage-managed. It’s this conscious shoehorning of cultural insight, toothless criticism and fable status that makes Beasts of the Southern Wild ideal for such lazy critical anointments as ‘The [insert superlative] American film of the year!’
2.5 STARS
