BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" is one of the most unusual and original films I've seen in a long time.  It is haunting, magical, and raw. The movie was adapted from a play by Lucy Alibar called, "Juicy and Delicious," about a ten year old boy and was set in Georgia.  She and her filmmaker friend, Benh Zeitlin, who ended up directing, changed the lead to a girl and moved the setting to the bayous outside New Orleans. The cast was made up of locals from the area.

Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy

"Beasts" stars and is narrated- more occasional philosophical musing than straight-ahead narration- by a button-nosed, ten-year-old marvel of a girl, Quvenzhané Wallis, who is not a trained actor, but can naturally and instinctively act circles around current child movie stars.  She plays wild-haired Hushpuppy, who lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry, also a non-actor who is a baker in real life) in a Louisiana lowland backwater.  Their relationship is detached in more ways than one. They are survivors of a previous hurricane and flood that left them and their neighbors isolated on small spit of land they call the Bathtub, a makeshift community where everyone knows and accepts one another whether a social service facilitator, pork-pie hat wearing blues musician, or a weathered alcoholic.  They are a happy, responsible mixture of mostly poor whites of all ages, rough-edged women and men whose hard lives are written on their faces and bodies; blond, freckle-faced girls and boys who live in wooden shacks and houseboats.  There's a school and, of course, a saloon; and a sort of clinic.   


Dwight Henry as Wink with Quvenzhané Wallis
Wink lives in a wreck of a mobile home across from his daughter's equally wrecked trailer; between them is a stretch of wilderness where junked, rusting appliances are strewn about, covered by a tangle of vines, trees and shrubs.  Chickens and pigs wander freely about.  Wink is an alcoholic who disappears for days, leaving her to fend for herself.   Dinner consists of his literally throwing a just-killed and plucked chicken on a makeshift barbeque.  He alerts her when it's done by pulling on a rope hung with a bell strung between the trailers.  Her mother, who vibrated such heat she "could turn on the stove just by moving past it," had disappeared when Hushpuppy was a baby, presumably to the local whorehouse across a wide canal.  Wink paints a picture of her that is pure poetic imagery.  Right away we see that Hushpuppy, who wears shorts, a tank top, and calf-high white rubber boots to traverse the wet, spongy land, is truly connected not only to the Earth, but the universe.  The child tells us what she sees and what she thinks about the creatures who are as alive to her as the humans who populate the Bathtub.  She is a prescient child who she sees in her mind's eye mountainous chunks of  ice calving from glaciers, and heaving seas, portending their rise caused by global warming. One scene depicts her and Wink in a makeshift boat on a canal, gazing out across to the concrete levy beyond which refineries spew toxic waste from their towering smokestacks.

Wild creatures do not fear Hushpuppy. Birds and small animals allow her to hold them to listen to their heartbeats.   At one point,when she and her father have an argument, she hits him on the chest.  He falls to the ground, unconscious.   She presses her ear to his heart, then runs for help.    Zeitlin filmed Hushpuppy's imaginings, created painterly by cinematographer, Ben Richardson, so that they segue seamlessly from her surroundings.  In one such scene,  beneath the ice we see through her eyes prehistoric beasts like a cross between a mammoth and a wild boar.  As the film progresses and the ice melts away, the mult-tusked beasts appear ready to break free, and do.  They charge after Hushpuppy in a startling, suspense-filled scene.

Local authorities patrolling the canals and bayous warn residents that a hurricane is due and that they have to evacuate to shelters.  Most opt to stay put, including Hushpuppy and Wink, along with a few diehards who shelter in the saloon as the thunderous, apocalyptic-sounding storm approaches, passes over them and dies.  (Some shots in the film depicting the aftermath of the storm reminded me of the horrific scenes of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward after the passing of Hurricane Katrina.)   Again, authorities come by and insist people come to be checked for water-borne diseases. A few resist violently and once sedated are brought in. The contrast between life in Bathtub and antiseptic scenes of the clinic and to see Hushpuppy in a radically different guise makes you sense what the people feel: manipulated and trapped.

 Once back home and now truly cut off, the people decide to live on their own: grow their own food and raise their own meat. And do, for time, until the changes in the water surrounding Bathtub as a result of the hurricane and the levies, impel Wink and others to do something about it.  Here, I questioned the writers for not having the perpetrators of certain obviously illegal actions face some consequences.  Still, overall, the film isn't about that.  It's about having reverence for all living things,recognizing the negative impact humans have made and continue to make on the earth, the seas, and the atmosphere surrounding this lovely blue planet, and instilling in us the need to do something about it now.

"Beasts" is in only 81 theatres, expanded this week (June 20) from 19 for two previous weeks. 
The audience percentage increased to +111.  In San Francisco, it's playing at the Bridge Theatre on Geary.  Check local listings for a theatre near you!