Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild – Benh Zeitlin’s first film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.  It is easy to see why.  Fantastically ambitious, the film contains almost too many ideas and most of them are liberal shibboleths – multiculturalism, the intrinsic nobility of the down and out, the virtuous courage of children, the tenacity of the poor in the face of terrible odds, climate change, the abandonment of the certain groups of people evident in the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina.  Although the picture is wildly uneven, most of it is extraordinary and gripping, although one must admit the narratives featuring children at risk are intrinsically compelling – apparently, we are wired to fear calamity visited upon small children and Zeitlin’s film exploits this neurological characteristic in his viewers with sinister aplomb.  Shot with vivid handheld camera, the movie plays like a combination of Slum Dog Millionaire and Where the Wild Things Are.  A preternaturally intelligent and resourceful five-year old girl lives in a horrific shanty-town called the Bathtub.  The Bathtub, apparently, is so named because it lies below sea-level in south Louisiana and is essentially a swamp surrounded by tidal estuaries – in fact, the Bathtub lies outside of the levees built to protect an adjacent refinery and, when the place floods, the filthy water is bottled up and can’t recede, drowning the wretched hamlet for weeks at a time.  The inhabitants of the Bathtub appear to be Southern grotesques, characters out of a Flannery O’Connor or Calder Willingham story – drunks, crazy whores, escapees from lunatic asylums, a retired pimp in a suit, people who snatchcatfish with their bare hands and live off crayfish and crabs that they catch in the bayous (sometimes, the slaughter an alligator and have a gator-feast).  The little girl, Hush-Puppy, lives with her ailing and violent father, Wink.  The plot of the movie, such as it is, narrates Wink’s deterioration and ultimate death as perceived by his daughter.  There is a great storm that floods and destroys the Bathtub although most of its inhabitants are too stubborn and too poor to leave their shanties.  Strangely, an evacuation order is implemented after the storm and the characters are rounded-up and forced to go to an antiseptic shelter where Wink sickens.  Implausibly, he somehow escapes with the rest of the Bathtub’s denizens and they return to their shack-village where Wink dies – his corpse is wrapped-up and set alight on a pontoon boat in one of the lagoons.  All of this is perceived by Hush-Puppy and presented, naively, with her voice-over.  Hush-Puppy has been told that the ice cap is melting, that the Bathtub will be submerged, and that, as the glaciers recede, the ancient, and extinct, aurochs will revive.  She imagines the aurochs as huge, shaggy mastodon-sized wild boars with savage-looking tusks and, often, we see them plowing through the landscape until ultimately they come to Hush-Puppy’s side.  Indomitable, she tames them, these wild, furry beasts from her Id.  Zeitlin is aware that his material is fundamentally simple-minded and highly sentimental, a celebration of the humble, but inspiring, virtues of the very poor.  Fearful that he will be accused of romanticizing poverty and mental illness, accordingly, Zeitlin makes the shanty-town almost unbelievably squalid and fills his screen with rotting meat, floating carcasses, dead fish, beasts that have been ripped apart so that their entrails are exposed, images of the mammoth-like aurochs dismembering and eating their own parents.  The Bath Tub looks so impoverished and filthy as to be toxic – the place makes the slums in Slum Dog Millionaire seem positively idyllic by comparison.  It’s an example of Zeitlin’s baroque sensibility, his too much too much of everything.  But the director can’t avoid the obviously contrived and deeply sentimental nature of his material – it’s like Ma Joad’s speech at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, the people, the invincible, self-reliant poor will not only survive but endure – and the death of Hush-Puppy’s father feels like the climax of La Boheme or Camille:  the man has some sort of disease, probably AIDS, that doesn’t really disable him until he has to die, decorously spitting blood like Puccini’s Mimi.  Much of the film is rapturous and feels like Terence Malick particularly with respect to Hush-Puppy’s highly poetic voice-over – the natural imagery seems similar to footage in The Tree of Life and the faux-naif narrative is like the young girl’s voice-over in Malick’s Days of Heaven (and, for that matter, Badlands).  Zeitlin freights the film with too many symbols:  an episode where the poor folk blow up the levee using a hollow gator as a dynamite-stuffed bomb makes no sense and is poorly staged and a sea-voyage to find Hush-Puppy’s mother that ends at a floating brothel and catfish joint, The Elysian Fields, is an excursion into Fellini-grotesque that doesn’t add anything to the picture and that seems completely contrived to booth. But Zeitlin’s visionary squalor is highly picturesque and the film is memorable and mostly excellent – its flaw are those of a young man:  he is simply too ambitious and wants to cram everything possible into this picture.  And the final scene in the movie, an image of the Bathtub’s inhabitants marching along a shattered roadway that the wild sea is eroding as we watch makes an enormously satisfying climax to the movie:  in Zeitlin’s view, we all live in a fragile place perched on the edge of destruction and, as the climate changes, we will share the fate of the wretches inhabiting the Bathtub.