The word that I kept hearing before I sat down and watched Beasts of the Southern Wild was “original.” The talk was that it was such a wildly original film, it would be completely unlike anything else I had ever seen. I didn’t find it to be that exactly. You could compare its ramshackle, junkyard aesthetic to the sets from City of Lost Children, its lingering on nature imagery to the “visual poetry” of a Terrence Malick film, and its mixing of fairy tale elements with bleak realism to something like Pan’s Labyrinth. Too many films have been made with too many different approaches for anything to be wholly original these days. I think what people really mean is that this film is hard to write about.
While you can see bits and pieces of influences from other works cropping up here and there, Beasts of Southern Wild puts them in a setting that most are unfamiliar with, and don’t feel comfortable speaking with authority on. It tells a pretty simple father/daughter story at its core, but it doesn’t follow the usual sort of narrative structure that scholarly types are used to picking apart and examining. And its director, Benh Zeitlin, and its stars, Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, are all newcomers, so they haven’t done any work that we can look back on and compare this to. That all adds up to a filmgoing experience that’s pretty hard to attack, intellectually. In the end, that shouldn’t really matter much though, because it’s not intellect that Beasts of the Southern Wild is directly targeting; it’s emotion.
That unique setting we’re introduced to is the Bathtub, a small island south of the levees in New Orleans. That’s significant for a couple reasons. The first being that it seems as if the further south you get in New Orleans, the more backwoods and colorful the characters get. And the second being that things south of the levee have literally been abandoned by the government, cursed to eventually disappear into the sea. Every time another big storm comes in, another chunk of the Bathtub is flooded forever, and soon it will cease to exist at all.
This is bad news for the people who live there—including a sick man named Wink (Henry) and his young daughter Hushpuppy (Wallis)—as they’re fiercely independent folk who would rather die than abandon their homes. Hushpuppy is our narrator, and this is her story. She’s an imaginative young girl, and pretty resourceful for her age. But she’s got a big hole in her life where her mother is supposed to go, and, at the same time, her father is such a large and looming figure that he’s almost too much to handle on his own. Still though, a crazy, wild-eyed dad is better than no dad at all, and Wink’s increasing illness is beginning to beg the question of who’s going to take care of Hushpuppy after he’s gone. She’s a resourceful young thing, but not that resourceful. As the status quo of the Bathtub changes around Hushpuppy, so too does the status quo of her life.
Doom is present in this film right from the beginning. From constant comments about the vicious nature of surviving in the world, to the approaching storm clouds, to the increasing signs of Wink’s illness, the Bathtub is just dripping with dread. And eventually all this dread causes Hushpuppy’s imagination to conjure up some prehistoric pig monsters, freed from the ices of the arctic and on a constant march toward the Bathtub to kill and eat her and everyone she knows. This is where the fantasy element of the film comes in. Well, it comes in with the inclusion of these fast approaching fiends as well as with the setting in general. Other than in one key scene, the entirety of this story is set in the Bathtub, a place so isolated and so different from any other part of the United States you’ve ever seen that it sort of feels like a fantasy world. The characters here, their world views are so limited that they may as well be in another dimension. For them there’s the people north of the levee—the crazy people—and the people south of the levee—the salt of the Earth—and that’s it. No other parts of the world necessarily exist. It makes for a unique filmgoing experience where anything is possible and you never quite know what’s real and what’s Hushpuppy’s imagination getting away from her.
That establishing of the world we’re exploring is so important here, because we’re not really being told a story with the usual beats or big happenings. The establishing and exploring of the world of the Bathtub is the story. Beasts of the Southern Wild is all about experiencing what it’s like to live somewhere totally foreign. It’s not about keeping abreast of what’s happening to the characters, it’s about making you live in their skin, making you feel what they’re feeling. In order for that to work—in order for it to be enough—the music of the film, the images, the performances, they all have to come together perfectly to create a completely transportive experience. Luckily, they do. Especially the performances.
There’s not much you can say about what Henry and Wallis do in this film, because it really needs to be seen to be believed. Both actors attack these roles with so much gusto that it seems like you’re watching them stand up and announce to the world that they have arrived and the movie industry is never going to be the same again. Their performances are electric, authentic, and deeply affecting, and—especially for someone Wallis’ age—it’s just damned astounding that neither of them had any training in acting before preparing for this film. It shouldn’t be long before they both have a line of casting agents knocking at their doors, and some serious consideration come awards season is certainly not out of the question. Best Actress Quvenzhané Wallis and Best Supporting Actor Dwight Henry sounds completely plausible right now, and it’s going to take some great work later in the year to keep that vision from becoming reality.
All of this isn’t to say that I found watching Beasts of the Southern Wild to be a transcendent experience all the way through, or that this will be a movie for everyone, however. Early on I had huge reservations. Most noticeably, the camera work can be incredibly jarring. This one is shooting for that faux-documentary feeling that rarely ever works out and usually just ends up making the audience queasy. The shots are all handheld, there seems to be purposeful jostling, and everything is even shot at a strangely low angle. For the first ten minutes of the film I found myself ridiculously distracted, as I often am when watching works with a similar aesthetic. But then a funny thing happened. After a while I eased into the technique. As I started to feel more comfortable living in Hushpuppy’s skin, it started to feel more natural that I was seeing things from her diminutive perspective. The camera work here isn’t just a fast and easy way to make things look gritty, it’s used for thematic reasons. And eventually it’s utilized to create some uniquely beautiful images that couldn’t have been captured any other way. It would seem that the impossible has happened: Beasts of the Southern Wild has taught me to stop worrying and learn to love shaky-cam.
Another of my oft-repeated criticisms is my belief that voice over narration is a sign of lazy screenwriting and something that rarely ever adds to a film. This movie is chock full of narration—as Wallis’ voice plays over the whole thing—but, once again, I didn’t mind how it was used here. Hushpuppy’s thought process is so childlike and unique that there was probably no other way to give us a clear understanding of how she sees the world, and the narration here is never used as a shortcut to skip around things that the director couldn’t pull off. It gets out of the way when necessary: the story develops naturally, the big emotional moments are performed by the actors in silence. Plus, the narrative bits are so well-written and Wallis delivers them with so much personality that the words mostly just play like poetic color that adds another layer of vibrancy to what was already a gorgeous and rich tapestry.
It would be possible to keep rambling on about all of the other things this movie does well, ad infinitum. I could bring up how great the score is, and how it seems to be the perfect blend of heroic film music with authentically New Orleans sounds. Or I could bring up individual standout scenes: the story of Hushpuppy’s conception, which makes a shotgun wielding woman splattered with gator blood sexier than you could ever imagine, the post-storm party scene, which makes a heroic moment out of eating sea food and has forever added the term, “beast it,” to my vocabulary, or the trip to a floating brothel, which brings to vibrant life a visualization of how children experience the love of their mothers. The individual elements of this movie aren’t necessarily what make it so great though, just like how the individual aspects of the production aren’t all that original when examined on their own. What makes Beasts of the Southern Wild great is how everything melts together into a complex, potent whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. It’s how each aspect of the film colors and enhances the others. The photography, the writing, the acting, the music, it all comes together perfectly to create the most delicious cinematic gumbo you’ve ever tasted. Gumbo that’s made out of beauty, dreams, and emotion... with just a smidge of fried gator. It may not be completely original, but it will do until original gets here.
