Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild

The bizarrely named Quvenzhane Wallis stars as the equally bizarrely named Hushpuppy, who lives in Louisiana bayou country, a place she calls ‘The bathtub’. Hushpuppy’s father (Dwight Henry) is a troubled, sometimes violent man who frequently abandons the girl, due to an unnamed illness he is being treated for. It’s an ugly and almost post-apocalyptic existence, full of poverty as the land they occupy is pretty much sinking around them, but they resist the call to evacuate. Hushpuppy is also having apocalyptic visions of giant wildebeests that look like something out of a Vincent Ward (“Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey”) film.

 

Based on a play by Lucy Aibar, this is unlike any American film I’ve ever seen. It feels like a foreign film, and yet it’s American and in English. Directed and co-written by debutant Benh Zeitlin, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it and the camerawork by Ben Richardson is appalling, but it’s too odd to be dull I think. I don’t really think young Quvenzhane Wallis deserved her Oscar nomination to be honest. She’s not terrible or anything, she’s just...a kid (6 years-old I think). She might develop her talent over the next few years but here she’s hardly ‘acting’, is she? At least previous Oscar-nominated child actress Keisha Castle-Hughes was a teenager at the time (13). She’s doing what she has been instructed to by the director (or, if you believe IMDb, her own mother who was on set- cheating, really), but at that age, no way is she really giving a ‘performance’, nor would she likely have much understanding of what she is doing. Anyone who thinks she’s truly acting, is clearly reading too much into things, and I really wish Oscar voters would think seriously before nominating someone so young and so clearly not ‘acting’. I mean, I think Drew Barrymore stole the show in “ET”, but she wasn’t acting, she was doing what she was told to do by Spielberg, and impressed with her charisma and adorability. That’s clearly not the same thing as acting talent. She was just being a cute kid, albeit cuter than most, and Wallis doesn’t even have that going for her. Wallis is not charismatic, articulate (just listen to her bits of narration), or terribly impressive. She’s just a regular kid, at least for now, and she was coached and directed to the point of doing what was necessary. She’s fine, just not great, and certainly not Oscar nomination worthy.

 

I was much more impressed with the work of Dwight Henry as her seriously troubled, occasionally violent, but ultimately loving and caring (in his own way) father. This guy is crazy as a nuthouse loon, occasionally negligent, and abusive at times, but also somewhat cognisant of the fact that he has a responsibility to look after and teach this girl how to survive and mature into adulthood. Henry, like Wallis (and the rest of the cast for that matter), is a non-professional actor and in fact a baker by trade, but unlike Wallis at least he’s old enough to understand what he is doing and why he is doing it, and is therefore giving a genuine performance worth praising in the role instead of praising the casting director for choosing the right kid to ‘be’ the role. He can use his whole life experience (He’s a father of several kids I believe) for getting into this role. How the hell would Wallis find something in her own life to bring to her role? Simply by being a kid? Hushpuppy is more than just a regular kid.

 

As I said, the camerawork is horrendous. It’s not just that it’s shaky-cam, it’s the fact that Richardson has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Some of it is even out of focus, which is really mind-boggling and unacceptable for one of the supposedly big and important films of 2012. The director apparently used the camera to project a child’s point of view. Um...a child’s point of view is just as stable as an adult’s. A child’s vision is not shaky or blurry unless they have the early on-set of Parkinson’s and are in dire need of a visit to the optometrist to boot. Steady low angles would’ve sufficed. The scenery and local flavour give this film something different, but at the same time, the scenery is awful because how could anyone live like this? Yes, it’s kinda stunning in its own decrepit Southern Gothic kinda way, but also really depressing because these people are refusing good advice to get up and leave their life of squalor. After a while, you kinda lose sympathy for anyone not seeing common sense and risking death due to some misplaced duty to stay in their dirty, soon-to-be underwater home.

 

Overrated for sure and probably not a film I’ll want to revisit. But a bad film? No, just a badly-shot one. And that’s a shame, because I’ve never seen anything quite like this before, and it has elements worthy of praise, if somewhat overpraised.

 

Rating: B-