Beasts of the Southern Wild
Aug. 22nd, 2012 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI saw Beasts of the Southern Wild a couple weeks ago – as it was a studio screening of a little indie film, I don't know if this review is well in advance of a wider release or hopelessly late. But I plow on, regardless!
For those who know nothing about it, which I suspect is pretty much everyone, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a story about a little girl named Hushpuppy growing up on an island in the Mississippi Delta which its zesty inhabitants call The Bathtub. She and her single dad live in the sort of abject squalor that would horrify most adults but which I suspect looks pretty attractive to children: Hushpuppy has her own house which is up on stilts in some trees, no one has to clean their room, there are friendly animals around everywhere, and she has free run of the island.
Unfortunately, things start to take a turn for the dire: Hushpuppy's dad has some mystery ailment which is rendering him distracted and occasionally incapacitated, and not long after that they get news that a storm is coming, which presumably is Katrina, though it's never namechecked. The island floods, the residents are forcibly relocated, all sorts of travails and traumas are undergone, but the fierce spirit of Hushpuppy and the Bathtub people always comes to the fore.
There's also an interesting subplot as (presumably) Hushpuppy's imagination extrapolates upon what she learns at the beginning about the ice age and icecaps melting, which both counters and compliments the main story.
I hadn't read that many reviews before going into this film – I don't usually read any, but I had heard nothing about it and was wondering whether to spend my lunch hour on it – but they gave me a very different impression of what the film was than what it turned out to be. It could be described as a sort of child's-eye-view fairy tale, but it is not Pan's Labyrinth. It is almost certainly Magical Realism, but it's not as dreamlike as Magic Realism tends to be; quite to the contrary, it feels more like a raw, blunt documentary. There is a story, but it's not a deliberate narrative so much as a capsule of a formative period in someone's life. There is a line in the film which sums up the feeling of it quite well: "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces." This film is those pieces. They are strung together in a way that sneakily has a dramatic arc, but really what ties everything together is that it's what made Hushpuppy. That, and some of the other philosophical asides, takes what might have been a random assemblage of images and episodes, and unites it all on an underlying level in a way which is really rather genius.
There is an obsession amongst Pixar/Disney creative leadership for 'worldbuilding,' and as a result, I am on a personal crusade to stick up for characters, who often get left by the wayside under this philosophy. I have to say, though, that the worldbuilding in Beasts of the Southern Wild is really remarkable – I didn't feel merely transported, but as though I actually 'got it': the people, the culture, their relationship to the place they call home. It might not be somewhere I, myself, would chose to spend the rest of my days, but these things are presented with understanding, and within very little time I was totally on their side; when the worst came and they were evacuated to a clean, air-conditioned, plugged-in rescue centre where they could receive proper medical care, I felt their misery and was rooting for them to escape, even though that made no objective sense. It's that kind of movie!
In fairness, though, a lot of the 'world' is Hushpuppy's worldview as much as it is a real, external point in space and time, so it comes right back around to character again.
Small thing of little consequence: At least one of the reviews I read mentioned the amazing CG in the fantasy(?) sequences with the aurochs. They were pigs in suits! They were not CG! That's why they looked amazing! Sheesh. (By the way, if you know anything about the actual prehistoric aurochs, you are advised to leave it by the door before you start watching this movie, otherwise an annoying gang of brain cells will be yelling They're related to bison, not swine!! as they were in my head.)
Oh, and I know everyone says this, but the little girl who plays Hushpuppy? BRILLIANT.
One thing which I really must bring up was something neglected by all the reviews I read, but which had enormous influence on my enjoyment of the movie: it's all shot handheld. It's not gratuitously all-over-the-place like Cloverfield, but even the 'steady' shots left me feeling slightly seasick. I've experienced this in movies before, so I knew to avert my gaze to something stationary in the theatre for a while, so it never got too bad. I hate bringing this up, because strong independent films like this should be supported, but if you have any problems with motion-sickness you're probably better off waiting for Netflix than picking this up in the local arthouse theatre. I don't think the film will lose all that much on the small screen (though it would benefit from a good sound system), and you benefit from not losing your lunch.
I leave you with a piece of the excellent soundtrack:
For those who know nothing about it, which I suspect is pretty much everyone, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a story about a little girl named Hushpuppy growing up on an island in the Mississippi Delta which its zesty inhabitants call The Bathtub. She and her single dad live in the sort of abject squalor that would horrify most adults but which I suspect looks pretty attractive to children: Hushpuppy has her own house which is up on stilts in some trees, no one has to clean their room, there are friendly animals around everywhere, and she has free run of the island.Unfortunately, things start to take a turn for the dire: Hushpuppy's dad has some mystery ailment which is rendering him distracted and occasionally incapacitated, and not long after that they get news that a storm is coming, which presumably is Katrina, though it's never namechecked. The island floods, the residents are forcibly relocated, all sorts of travails and traumas are undergone, but the fierce spirit of Hushpuppy and the Bathtub people always comes to the fore.
There's also an interesting subplot as (presumably) Hushpuppy's imagination extrapolates upon what she learns at the beginning about the ice age and icecaps melting, which both counters and compliments the main story.
I hadn't read that many reviews before going into this film – I don't usually read any, but I had heard nothing about it and was wondering whether to spend my lunch hour on it – but they gave me a very different impression of what the film was than what it turned out to be. It could be described as a sort of child's-eye-view fairy tale, but it is not Pan's Labyrinth. It is almost certainly Magical Realism, but it's not as dreamlike as Magic Realism tends to be; quite to the contrary, it feels more like a raw, blunt documentary. There is a story, but it's not a deliberate narrative so much as a capsule of a formative period in someone's life. There is a line in the film which sums up the feeling of it quite well: "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces." This film is those pieces. They are strung together in a way that sneakily has a dramatic arc, but really what ties everything together is that it's what made Hushpuppy. That, and some of the other philosophical asides, takes what might have been a random assemblage of images and episodes, and unites it all on an underlying level in a way which is really rather genius.
There is an obsession amongst Pixar/Disney creative leadership for 'worldbuilding,' and as a result, I am on a personal crusade to stick up for characters, who often get left by the wayside under this philosophy. I have to say, though, that the worldbuilding in Beasts of the Southern Wild is really remarkable – I didn't feel merely transported, but as though I actually 'got it': the people, the culture, their relationship to the place they call home. It might not be somewhere I, myself, would chose to spend the rest of my days, but these things are presented with understanding, and within very little time I was totally on their side; when the worst came and they were evacuated to a clean, air-conditioned, plugged-in rescue centre where they could receive proper medical care, I felt their misery and was rooting for them to escape, even though that made no objective sense. It's that kind of movie!
In fairness, though, a lot of the 'world' is Hushpuppy's worldview as much as it is a real, external point in space and time, so it comes right back around to character again.
Small thing of little consequence: At least one of the reviews I read mentioned the amazing CG in the fantasy(?) sequences with the aurochs. They were pigs in suits! They were not CG! That's why they looked amazing! Sheesh. (By the way, if you know anything about the actual prehistoric aurochs, you are advised to leave it by the door before you start watching this movie, otherwise an annoying gang of brain cells will be yelling They're related to bison, not swine!! as they were in my head.)
Oh, and I know everyone says this, but the little girl who plays Hushpuppy? BRILLIANT.
One thing which I really must bring up was something neglected by all the reviews I read, but which had enormous influence on my enjoyment of the movie: it's all shot handheld. It's not gratuitously all-over-the-place like Cloverfield, but even the 'steady' shots left me feeling slightly seasick. I've experienced this in movies before, so I knew to avert my gaze to something stationary in the theatre for a while, so it never got too bad. I hate bringing this up, because strong independent films like this should be supported, but if you have any problems with motion-sickness you're probably better off waiting for Netflix than picking this up in the local arthouse theatre. I don't think the film will lose all that much on the small screen (though it would benefit from a good sound system), and you benefit from not losing your lunch.
I leave you with a piece of the excellent soundtrack:
