Thoughts on BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

Who is Benh Zeitlin? How is this his first feature film? How on earth did the movie happen?

I don't understand this.

Benh Zeitlin is the co-writer, director, AND co-composer (my favorite score of the year so far) of BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, a first for the guy which doesn't make any sense when you watch the film. It feels so assured in its style, its tone, its look, its treatments of its main characters, almost everything feels contradictory to the fact that it is a first film.

Which makes me so envious. (I watched an interview online and he looks like he is 22 years old. I felt so bad about myself and my ambitions. But it turns out he's about to be 30. So I feel a little better. Just a little.)

It is weird how certain ambitious films work for and me and others don't. Terrance Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE is a mess, yet a beautiful one, and the almost as equally ambitious PROMETHEUS falls flat on its face for me. BEASTS is one of those where I can get past the messiness and find the greatness. So, very much like a first film, it isn't perfect. However, what ultimately is presented to us is a colorfully ambitious film that isn't afraid to go big and take chances.

The story is this: Hushpuppy (played by non actor Quvenzhané Wallis, who is used extremely well) lives with her daddy in an isolated island off the coast of Louisiana and must come to terms with an oncoming threat of her town being destroyed by a storm and her father's fatal heart condition. 


Oh, also there are magical beasts called Aurochs. 

The world presented here is filled with garbage, wet and grimy, sticky and muddy. The Bathtub, the isolated village the film lives in, is dirty. but next to the grime is a magical quality that I can't pinpoint exactly how it is achieved. A film professor told me once that the audience always wants their trash to be aesthetically pleasing. Beautiful garbage he says. And this is what BEASTS looks like.

In fact most of the film works by having two unlike things together on screen.

Almost every scene has two opposing concepts conflicting with each other. Beauty and disgust. Joy and sadness. Physically impoverished and emotionally rich. Life and death. The film walks the line between each conflicting themes pretty effortlessly. Something is in conflict with its opposition in every shot of the film.

BEATS also creates an individual conflict for the audience. The film is told with a 6 year old's perspective of the world which is really the main reason why this movie works for me. We see through her eyes extreme poverty, apocalyptic natural disasters, whore houses, and death.

These moments do two things: they bring us back to the feelings we had as a child dealing with the darkness of the world, and the naivety we had when dealing with them. But our own experiences and knowledge continually undercuts this with a tinge of sadness. Its a conundrum really. Feeling a child's naivety while keeping our adult cynicism in the backseat feels really odd and strange, but also new and exciting. I would really compare this film to Spike Jonze's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. Both films deal with a child-like perspective on the world, yet they allow us to think of our own childhood memories which will ultimately always lead us to compare our thought process then and how we think now.

The unbalanced feeling I had while watching BEASTS really did excite me.

At the heart of the film is what Hushpuppy ultimately does. It is what we all do in our lives without realizing it and that is creating our own narrative about our lives. Quite a few times she says that "In a million years, when kids go to school they gonna know, once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." She matters, everyone will know who she is, her actions affect the entire world. Which is so heartfelt and sad. We know very few care for this girl, who lives off the land in shanty houses separated from the rest of us. But it is hard to want to contradict her. I think this is what we all want to believe. That we have made a large impact on the world. What the film does is give that to her.

This film has gained some criticism for being exploitative and promoting anti-government agendas and isolationism. That the narrative is bunk and its depictions of its characters as unflattering. I don't quite get why some people are delving into the politics of this film. It is definitely an emotional ride rather than claiming a political statement. It has these elements, yes, but they are never dwelled upon and are pushed aside for the emotional story of Hushpuppy. It is a much more visceral film than what these critics are saying.
A good article about the polarizing effect this film has can be read over at IndieWire.

This is one of the bests movies of the year and I highly recommend seeking it out. Seriously, the audience I saw it with applauded and didn't move from their seats until the credits had ended, which is a rarity for a non-superhero film. Go for the amazing performance Wallis gives. Or go for the incredible visuals. Just go see it. In a summer of emotionally empty summer films (I'm looking at you Dark Knight Rises) BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is much needed. It really will affect you in some way or another.