Beasts of the Southern Wild
(2012)
It’s usually a clear warning sign when the Oscars embrace a
heart-warming or uplifting tale of triumph over adversity. The results often
tend to simplify issues, reduce themes to their most facile, and bang out notes
that just don’t ring true. While it is always welcome to see independent movies
get nominated, it can’t escape notice that when they do (Little Miss Sunshine), their trajectory is invariably one of punch-the-air
uplifting overpowering sadness or misery. Which is no bad thing in theory;
life-affirmatory sentiments are grand things. The downside is that, if these
messages are not put together with a nuance, skill and craftsmanship that
belies their apparent straightforwardness, they comes across as cheap or
manipulative. In Beast of the Southern
Wild, director Benh Zeitlin creates an environment that is arresting and
immersive, but as co-writer he fails to fully evoke the child’s eye viewpoint that
is central to the premise.
Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar’s screenplay (based on her one-act
play Juicy and Delicious) is narrated
by Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), a six-year old girl living with her alcoholic
father Wink (Dwight Henry) in an isolated community called the Bathtub. They
are situated in a Louisiana bayou cut off by a levee; this is an edge-of-the-world
existence to Hushpuppy, and the idiosyncratic schooling she and other children
receive gives rise to a rich fantasy world filled with an imminent threat of
melting ice caps and the encroaching presence of prehistoric boar-like animals
called Aurochs (the actual name of an extinct bovine species). As her father’s
physical condition worsens, so the Bathtub is flooded during a storm and the
community’s tentative existence becomes even less certain.
If Hushpuppy’s narration and fantasy world feels like a highly
calculated device, it’s because the writers are unable to successfully
integrate it with the main narrative. Hushpuppy’s internal monologue never
feels less than over-writing by adult(s) attempting to imbue her with the kind
of innocent cutesy-wisdom that sends grown-ups all misty-eyed. And then it goes
further, making the mistake of thinking this untutored innocence can teach us
something. Because its artificiality is so clear (i.e. adults are the writers)
it comes across as patronising rather than inspiring. We end up with a rambling
gabble of homespun homilies, bearing more resemblance to Forrest Gump’s (another
Academy darling) pearls of wisdom than anything that borders on essential
truths.
There are doubtless a number of debates to be had over the
film’s depiction of race and class (as plundering of stereotypes as the film
may appear, it is worth noting that the play on which it is based feature white
leads; nevertheless, the affected vernacular the writers have come up with is at
times slightly too much, as if this is extant dialogue from Tom Hanks’
character in Cloud Atlas), and the
pervading push-pull of what we are shown versus what we hear. The writers might
have done something provocative with this material, but what their approach is
relatively straightforward.
The Bathtub folk extol the virtues of their freedom from the
system, which as an idea is an attractive one (although some have interpreted
this in libertarian terms). But the “truth” we are shown is that the adults
subsist on alcohol, while the father’s physical deterioration is a direct
result of the surrounding squalor. Indeed, the refrain to the children is to
toughen up and don’t be a pussy (these are kids who, like Max Rockatansky,
think nothing of eating cat food; it’s near-as a post-apocalyptic world); this
is an environment where the kids show reluctance to learn necessary survival
skills (catching fish, eating crabs), and in the mind’s eye (of Hushpuppy) are
starved of true parental affection.
To an extent, the movie succeeds in conveying the state of
mind of child who accepts the only world she knows for what it is and imagines
a further one, but this is almost entirely by means of Ben Richardson’s
evocative cinematography and a charging music (by the director and Dan Romer),
rather than the achievements of the writers.
The fall back mode of “life is beautiful despite it all” is not
redundant because it is naïve or simplistic, but because the only means the Zeitlin
and Alibar have of expressing it is through overstatement. This is perhaps best
exemplified by the triumphant, heart-swelling score (cynical as I am of Academy
motives, I feel sure this was a major selling point), which rouses the audience
with the finesse of a master manipulator whenever Hushpuppy’s has a some glib
self-actualisation to impart. So too, the means by which she pieces together
her understanding of the world are clumsily rendered; this is magical realism romanticised
to the point where the subjective world of the child becomes overt commentary,
rather than one we empathically experience.
As a result, certain aspects work better than others; when
Hushpuppy punches her ailing father, and he succumbs to a seizure, we engage
fully with how her reaction; moments, before she told him she wished he were
dead. Later, the odyssey on which she and her friends embark treads the line
between fantasy and reality perfectly; up until the point where her yearnings
for a mother are verbally expressed to a mother figure (a prostitute who feeds
her alligator; her actual mother shot an alligator on the day she was
conceived, we are told). The preceding scene, where the surrogate mothers/prostitutes
dance with the children at a whorehouse called Elysian Fields (geddit?), has a
wordless beauty to it. It is in this he sequence, with its fragmented,
non-linear pose (beginning with the kids swimming out to a boat, which takes
them to an underworld/heaven, the captain of which informs Hushpuppy that he
likes retains all his chicken biscuit wrappers because “The smell makes me feel cohesive”) that the film nears the sense of
transcendence it seeks. Then, when Hushpuppy announces, “I have to go back” and
is transported to the vicinity of the Bathtub, it is the author’s voice not the
child’s that intrudes.
As is usual in a tale of this ilk, the fantasy elements
reflect the dramas of the real world and eventually converge at a climactic
moment. We are introduced to fantasy imagery of melting ice flows and thawing creatures,
but somehow this never really ignites the way it should. Perhaps the world Hushpuppy
inhabits is so palpably different, and key moments such as the visualisation of
her running through a trail of sparklers, are so arresting and heightened that
the “actual” flights end up curiously flat. The poetry of her imaginings is
forced. The advancing boars always feel surplus to the text, rather than
integral. And worse they seem obvious inventions, rote mythmaking, just as
Hushpuppy’s conversations with her absent mother are too common a touchstone. Compare
Hushpuppy’s journey to the much less accessible path trodden by Eliza-Rose in
Terry Gilliam’s Tide Land, and it
feels as if Zeitlin goes for easy elation every time.
Wallis received an Oscar nomination of course, on account of
her being a stoically cute little moppet, with hair outcrop of hair loving
framed against the Sun. It’s hard to say how good this performance actually is;
Wallis has a wonderfully expressive eyes but Hushpuppy’s character is so
informed by the over-egged narration, I suspect it will take a few more roles
to assess whether this is a one-off. Annie
will likely either bag her an Oscar or have her re-assessed as a one hit child
wonder. It’s Henry who really impresses, from his drunken delirium and
aggression, to the chinks in his armour when he shows how much he cares for his
daughter, to his more convivial side. He’s strong enough that, even when the
film drifts into sentiment during the final stages, Wink remains a
fully inhabited character.
Beast is enjoyable
enough on its own terms, but the hype has overwhelmed its content. Independent
cinema that leaves you in mind of Hollywood cinema but without the budget is
not necessarily a strike, but it becomes one when, instead of resonance and depth,
there is emotional rhetoric and slickness. Beasts
is well-performed, possessed of a striking visual palate, and blessed with
a stirring score, but it is also very far from profound.
***