Beasts Of The Southern Wild Review

4th Feb 2013

Beasts of the Southern Wild is the strange tale of Hushpuppy, a six-year-old living on a flood-threatened island called The Bathtub near New Orleans. While it is suggested that this is Katrina era, director Benh Zeitlin has created a place and time that could as easily be post-apocalyptic as it could be primitive earth. Infused with magical realism–or just plain fantasy–Hushpuppy’s life is a kind of wilderness ever more endangered by outside forces that threaten her small family and the community that are her whole world. Beasts of the Southern Wild follows her surprisingly eventful journey to protect herself from these dangerous forces.

Hushpuppy herself is a fierce, beautiful little creature, played with amazing effortlessness by non-actor, Quvenzhané Wallis. She is lonely, crushed by the absence of her mother but soldiering on regardless; desperate to live her life and obsessed by the living world around her. Petty cruelties shrink the warmth from her world. She is banned from crying, and does not even share her father’s shack at his own insistence, yet her humanity if not her innocence, is largely intact. Wink, her father (played by another non-actor, Dwight Henry) is on the other hand, struggling through his life weighed down by regret, sickness and alcoholism. He is an ornery drunk, full of abusive love whose major parenting tack seems to follow the method of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. For Wink, there is nothing worse than being a ‘pussy’ and his challenges to Hushpuppy to prove she is strong enough to survive–the visceral manual pulverising of a crab, for example–are shocking. His own physical frailty is the only thing he seeks to hide from his daughter; she is exposed to every other trauma the world has to offer. Though there seems to be a fierce love beneath the surface of his constant berating, it doesn’t quite forgive his brutality towards her.

The Bathtub is a swampy island encroached on by ever rising waters. Its population a grubby, mixed assembly of outcasts knit together by hardship and a sense of pride at their sheer ballsiness of making a life there. Their life is set at extremes, where drunken shambolic festivals give way to polluted water and devastating storms. There is also a constant awareness of an advancing threat, embodied for Hushpuppy in the (imagined?) thunderous approach of huge boar-like aurochs. Whether this threat is the proximity of the outside world, or the more destructive cyclical nature of the world and the imminence of an apocalypse, remains to be seen.

The boundary between ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ is in this case quite literal. It is the levee holding back the waters from the cities that also keeps the Bathtub surrounded by lapping tides. While it is clear there is no desire to become one of those who live in comfort and safety on dry land, there is a definite bitterness towards those beyond the wall. The modern world is pretty soundly vilified. When forcibly taken to the shelter after the flood destroys most of the Bathtub, Hushpuppy is deeply unsettled by the machines, the cleanliness and lack of vitality. The stark colours and lighting all highlight how unnatural everything is in the clinic. Where there was a basic, immediate feeling of pity for this dirty child scrabbling in the mud for food at the beginning of the film, here there is the palpable certainty that this is where we should feel sorry for her. It is here she is trapped and lost, not in the scrubby muddy jungle of her home.

It’s a beautiful film. Despite the ranting and shouting, there are moments of great stillness and placidness–dancing dust motes and contemplative shots of hushpuppy’s perfect little face as she watches the world go by. The music is lovely, and echoes just the right amount of whimsy. Not too sugary and not too elegiac.

Somewhere between fantasy, fairytale and eco-fable on the destruction of the planet, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a gorgeous film. Not in a rich, ornamental way, but in an exhilarating, freewheeling way, much like Where the Wild Things Are. Hushpuppy’s life is one big rumpus, with the addition of real heartache and loss.

Bonus Features include a ‘making of’, some commentary on deleted scenes (but not the whole film) as well as the theatrical trailer, music, and auditions and pieces on the aurochs.