Beasts Of The Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)

Beasts Of The Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) is an award winning indie film which tells the story of a poor father and daughter living in a small Delta community under the threat of flood. The central character ‘Hushpuppy’ wants to find her mother as life gradually becomes more challenging and her father experiences a sickness. This drama follows the story of these two characters and all the problems they encounter in this particular environment of poverty. The film opened to fantastic reviews following its success at the Sundance film festival and would go on to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

My first impressions of this film is that I really didn’t enjoy it. I had never seen this film before and I may be missing something that really engages or moves other viewers, but I found the direction to be lazy and the narrative to be problematic in ways. Stylistically, the filmmaker clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the work of Wong Kar Wai (as so many independent filmmakers have… hand held cameras, provocative score, voice over, aesthetically pleasing visuals, etc.) but I found watching that these techniques were being used out of laziness and not to serve the overall plot. A film such as In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000) works so well because the style is an integral element of an already complex and engaging story, but it never serves as a distraction. In Beasts Of The Southern Wild, Zeitlin appears to really be leaning on certain ‘moments’ in which emotions are heightened (through undeniably great performances) and a score whose frequent use only serves to prove how much needs to be compensated for often sloppy hand held filmmaking (I truly love hand held, but in this film it’s misused). The acting is all pretty fantastic, but what holds these terrific actors back is the filmmaking and premise more often than not. The screenplay leans on far too many moments of over the top, emotional dialogue and the director clearly leans on the score a bit too often. I can, however, understand why someone would react emotionally to sequences in the film for the exact same reasons.

A lot more important however, is that the story has issues. A famously divisive element of the narrative (that I had known about going in) is how the film, to an extent, ‘romanticizes’ the lives of those living in poverty and I must say that this was definitely the worst part of the film. I would argue the film redeems itself to an extent with how the central child character of ‘Hushpuppy’, played by Quvenzhane Wallis, develops through the course of the film (again, assisted by really great acting). But then of course there is also the issues that come with the representation of child abuse (it could be argued, it’s far too forgiving a portrayal and characterised by stereotypes). The film definitely has its moments though. For instance, the opening sequence is definitely a highlight in terms of cinematography, but I just can’t help but view the overall movie as a pretty flawed piece of work, both in terms of style and substance. I understand that others view the film very very differently and I can completely understand why, but I personally didn’t get good things out of this.