Beasts of the Southern Wild

Just look at that face.

The cynical amongst my vast international readership might suggest Mrs. Curmudgeon and I would be suckers for pretty much any movie featuring a beautiful African-American girl with (let's be honest) unruly hair who has issues caused by being abandoned by her mother and father. Nonetheless, Beasts of the Southern Wild is, objectively, astonishing.

I won't try to summarize the plot because, while it appears to have one, it really can't be summarized in any way other than the way the curmudgelings summarize movie plots, by exhaustively recounting, scene-by-scene and line by line, everything that occurs. I had read and listened to any number of reviews and interviews with the director before we saw the movie, and I was utterly unprepared for anything that happened. (I should, however, insert a spoiler alert here; I'm a critic, not a reviewer.)

It's easier to jump straight from plot to symbol and archetype: Beasts of the Southern Wild is a consideration of the end of the world executed through a metaphorical account of how New Orleans and the Gulf Coast came through hurricanes Katrina and Rita seven years ago. And yes, it is audacious as all get out.

It works because of Quvenzhané Wallis, who, as Hushpuppy, delivers the most astonishing big-screen debut since Amy Adams in Junebug. The kid doesn't just carry the movie, she is the movie. According to the director, Benh Zeitlin, she rewrote her lines before each day's shooting, which makes me really hope she's responsible for "Kids who got no mommy and daddy have to live in the woods and eat grass and steal underpants." So true, and here's hoping the Adoption Exchange puts that on a bumpersticker.

By turning our attention the residents of the Bathtub, an mythical outpost south of a flood-control levee on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the film runs the risk of coming off as a patronizing celebration of the noble savage. It escapes this by Court 13's approach to film-making, which is so collaborative it allows a six year-old to write her own lines. The company is comprised of Louisiana locals who had major input into the final product. Moreover, Hushpuppy's father, Wink, is hardly romanticized: his care for his daughter could be generously called "competent" only by a severely delusional hippie, and he also happens to be a violent drunk who is in the process of drinking himself to death. Hushpuppy is the movie's only hero.

Beyond that, Beasts of the Southern Wild is about far more than, well, the southern wild. The bayous are menaced not just by storms, but also by aurochs, prehistoric beasts who ate cave babies and are released from icy suspended animation by the melting of the polar ice caps. (Don't worry: this is all covered in the opening scenes.) The aurochs menace and destroy everything and everyone, not just the Bathtub, so the viewer cannot safely distance himself from the threats facing Hushpuppy and her neighbors.

While I don't think this movie is a celebration of people who make some pretty foolish choices and live a rather sordid lifestyle, it does claim that they, and by metaphorical extension, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, exist and have a story, and that story should be heard. In that sense, it is a profoundly humanistic film in the sense that it defiantly recognizes that even the lowest of men are created in the image of God and, as such and even if only as such, deserve our recognition. Hushpuppy doesn't summarize the plot, but she does summarize the film when she says at its end, "Future scientists will know there was Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub."