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Hushpuppy, a slow-to-smile 6-year-old girl played by Quvenzhané Wallis, lives in the Bathtub, a proudly independent pocket of Louisiana where a handful of residents exist on what nature and the scraps of civilization provide. Some of the Bathtub’s residents, like Wallis and her troubled, ailing father (Dwight Henry), dwell in trailers mounted above ground to fight the rising tides, and eat food culled from the animals that live alongside them, or pulled from the ocean, or taken from a seemingly endless supply of canned goods, most of which look aged and beaten, and some of which were never intended for human consumption in the first place. Wallis doesn’t share a home with Henry, but she lives nearby in a dilapidated space she shares with the ghost of her mother, or a voice she imagines to be her ghost. Sometimes Henry tosses a whole chicken on the grill—after first pulling it from an iceless cooler—and shares it with her. Other times, he’s not around at all. Wallis gets by anyway. The people of the Bathtub are good at getting by.
At school, she learns about the aurochs: unpitying, prehistoric beasts now awakened to walk the Earth again. At night she dreams of horned, woolly animals making their way across the land, awakened from frozen slumber by melting ice caps and destroying whatever crosses their path. She might be letting her imagination run wild. Or she might have a gift for seeing what others can’t: The little bit of rundown world her people call their own may soon face a new threat to its existence.
Beasts Of The Southern Wild never fully chooses between those options, but it isn’t really in the question-answering business. The remarkable, lyrical feature debut of Benh Zeitlin—a New York filmmaker with a background in animation who relocated to Louisiana in advance of making the film—Beasts moves with a dreamlike pulse, and is never better than when it doesn’t feel the need to move much at all. The opening scenes present an idealized idea of life amid those with nothing to lose. In a voiceover made all the more poetic by Wallis’ unpracticed delivery—the first of several elements that bring Terrence Malick to mind—Wallis contrasts life in the Bathtub to life behind the levee, where folks have means but little time for the Bathtub’s seemingly nightly celebrations, where alcohol flows freely and fireworks light up the sky. It’s a joyous existence, but also a perilous one. A strong storm could wipe them out. Those that live there do so at their own peril, but consider it worth the risk. Better to live free in the riches of nature than surrounded by prosperity and plenty that’s always out of reach.
As the film progresses, the peril starts to overtake the joyousness, sending Wallis, her father, and others on an episodic journey that takes them to what’s left of civilization—and maybe back home again. Zeitlin, who co-wrote the film with Lucy Alibar from her play, offers only vague allusions to a catastrophe that’s reshaped the world, leaving viewers as much in the dark as Wallis as to what’s happened, and what might happen next. But the state of the Bathtub bears a familiar look of not-so-benign neglect. No one mentions Katrina, but the hurricane and other recent disasters loom over Beasts. Zeitlin transforms the aftermath of the storm into a fantasy of neighborly barbarism, as if all those neglected in Katrina’s wake decided to split off from a nation that had no interest in their well-being. They’ve lapsed into what’s, by all appearances, an agreeable state of anarchy, albeit one in danger of being washed away.
Hushpuppy, a slow-to-smile 6-year-old girl played by Quvenzhané Wallis, lives in the Bathtub, a proudly independent pocket of Louisiana where a handful of residents exist on what nature and the scraps of civilization provide. Some of the Bathtub’s residents, like Wallis and her troubled, ailing father (Dwight Henry), dwell in trailers mounted above ground to fight the rising tides, and eat food culled from the animals that live alongside them, or pulled from the ocean, or taken from a seemingly endless supply of canned goods, most of which look aged and beaten, and some of which were never intended for human consumption in the first place. Wallis doesn’t share a home with Henry, but she lives nearby in a dilapidated space she shares with the ghost of her mother, or a voice she imagines to be her ghost. Sometimes Henry tosses a whole chicken on the grill—after first pulling it from an iceless cooler—and shares it with her. Other times, he’s not around at all. Wallis gets by anyway. The people of the Bathtub are good at getting by.
At school, she learns about the aurochs: unpitying, prehistoric beasts now awakened to walk the Earth again. At night she dreams of horned, woolly animals making their way across the land, awakened from frozen slumber by melting ice caps and destroying whatever crosses their path. She might be letting her imagination run wild. Or she might have a gift for seeing what others can’t: The little bit of rundown world her people call their own may soon face a new threat to its existence.
Beasts Of The Southern Wild never fully chooses between those options, but it isn’t really in the question-answering business. The remarkable, lyrical feature debut of Benh Zeitlin—a New York filmmaker with a background in animation who relocated to Louisiana in advance of making the film—Beasts moves with a dreamlike pulse, and is never better than when it doesn’t feel the need to move much at all. The opening scenes present an idealized idea of life amid those with nothing to lose. In a voiceover made all the more poetic by Wallis’ unpracticed delivery—the first of several elements that bring Terrence Malick to mind—Wallis contrasts life in the Bathtub to life behind the levee, where folks have means but little time for the Bathtub’s seemingly nightly celebrations, where alcohol flows freely and fireworks light up the sky. It’s a joyous existence, but also a perilous one. A strong storm could wipe them out. Those that live there do so at their own peril, but consider it worth the risk. Better to live free in the riches of nature than surrounded by prosperity and plenty that’s always out of reach.
As the film progresses, the peril starts to overtake the joyousness, sending Wallis, her father, and others on an episodic journey that takes them to what’s left of civilization—and maybe back home again. Zeitlin, who co-wrote the film with Lucy Alibar from her play, offers only vague allusions to a catastrophe that’s reshaped the world, leaving viewers as much in the dark as Wallis as to what’s happened, and what might happen next. But the state of the Bathtub bears a familiar look of not-so-benign neglect. No one mentions Katrina, but the hurricane and other recent disasters loom over Beasts. Zeitlin transforms the aftermath of the storm into a fantasy of neighborly barbarism, as if all those neglected in Katrina’s wake decided to split off from a nation that had no interest in their well-being. They’ve lapsed into what’s, by all appearances, an agreeable state of anarchy, albeit one in danger of being washed away.
