Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

I am a coonass. I am from Southwest Louisiana and am a part of the joie de vivre culture of South Louisiana. This world has embraced me and rolled up in its cocoon of love of place, of family, of celebration all my life. Beasts of the Southern Wild comes the closest of any movie I have ever seen to expressing the truth of the sheer beauty of life in the swamps. Through the devastation of hurricanes, the opression of the wealthy, and the well-meaning of outsiders, we survive. And yet our world is dying. We know it as surely as we can see the trees dying on the marshes as the salt water moves further inland, because our buffers are dissappearing. We know it when we drive the roads and watch the waves lap against our tires or roar against the sides of our cars. We know it when we fish and see the open water where once there was land.

This movie, better than any other, cherishes these truths and films them. I'm grateful that Zeitlan chose not to embrace Cajuns in this movie, because that aspect of our culture has become so commercialized and is so foreign that all people pay attention to when given that in a film are the quaint accents. He chose a creole culture (that does exist more or less) in a place (that also does exist, more or less) and gives it nickname that expresses many of our worst fears about what can happen to cherished lands after a bad flood and storm due to the levee system that was designed, in many cases, to protect some interests only.

Many of the aspects of this movie were drawn from real-life. Levees have been blown up in the past to the decimation of entire creole cultures. Hurricanes come with regularity and destroy much; ome people do not have resources or the ability to leave and some stay out of sheer cussedness. Thanks to coastal erosion, our world is disappearing and will be gone one day into the warm waters of the Gulf.

And yet Zeitlan could not end it there. He tells a story of destruction and death, but one in which children lose all and yet grow up and contain the magic inside them and take the strength of their miraculous orgins with them and can rebuild.

This movie captures who we are, in all our squalor and all our glory and all the uniqueness of the many shifting ethnic and cultural groups that make up this place and this time and make us unique and it captures why it is so heartrending that one day, perhaps not in my lifetime, but perhaps in Wallis's, it will all be gone and only our land's children will be left to bring the strength of this place with them.

A good film is a confluence of many variables. A good director orchestrates these variables into a finished form. Beasts of the Southern Wild is such a film and Behn Zeitlin is such a director. And the brilliance of Zeitlin is that he manages to take all manner of seemingly contradictory elements and make them,as a nameless boat captain says in the film, cohesive.

One such variable is story. Hushpuppy is a six-year-old girl who lives with her father on the wrong side of a levee in a fictitious Southeast Louisiana town called The Bathtub. The film follows her point of view, and the world of her active imagination and the real world around her often intertwine on screen. The film is your standard coming of age story, but it is this unique perspective of Hushpuppy and her understanding of the world around her that is the foundation of the film and its magic.

Another variable is music. The director worked closely with his friend and composer Dan Romer in creating the score for the film. The result is one of the best scores in modern cinema. Just like the film, the music is a beautiful blend of contradictions. It's uplifting yet tinged with sadness, vast yet intimate, wise and noble yet naive and playful.

And the final variable I'll mention is performance. Other reviewers have made mention of the non-actors that occupy this film. This is another example of the director taking the contradictory and making it cohesive. It would seem unlikely that those untrained in the craft of acting would be able to aptly portray such subtlety, humor, love and pathos yet there it is, captured on film for all to see.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a film that will simultaneously break, mend, and uplift your heart. Do your soul a favor and see this film.

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BOTSW is easily the best movie of 2012 so far (although I loved 'Moonrise Kingdom' too), and the stars should get ready for Oscar season. The pacing may be off-putting to some, but if you can handle artsy fare, you're sure to love it. The story tells the tale of eight year old Hushpuppy, who must save her father, friends, and herself from mysterious beasts in what may or may not be the end of the world. The lines between fantasy and reality are very blurry, which makes this movie a great discussion piece for a group. One thing I will note is that while everything about this movie is exceptional, the score is one of the best I've heard in a long time. I went to a screening with the film's director and two stars, and they spoke to how organic the entire film process was, and how elements in the script were rewritten for each of the leads so the dialogue would sound authentic to the deep south. Every detail is watched carefully, and this is truly a must-see.

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It is difficult to find the words to describe the mysterious enchantment of this film. So much depends on the performance of young Quvenzhane Wallis, a child who is not a trained actressand yet she more than holds her own compared to seasoned actors.She shines, brightly, in her role as 6 year old Hushpuppy.

The film focuses on life in "The Bathtub" , a poor section of Louisiana. Surviving there is precarious and everything can be swept away if water overflows the levee system.Hushpuppy has a world view which helps create order amidst chaos but it is about to be severely tested.

The Bathtub community, so vividly seen through Hushpuppy's eyes, is one layer of this filmthe words and soundtrack add depth and resonance which result in a film poetic enough to take your breath away. And the images...from Hushpuppy's expressive face to a homemade boat floating on water...they are also hypnotic.

I urge you not to focus only on what is literal or seems true to life in this film. Watching it is often like dreaming while awake. This is not to say that Beasts of the Southern Wild is too artsy. But the plot is portrayed most strongly through the eyes of an imaginative and sensitive 6 year old.

And this is always the part of a film review where I hesitate to provide any information that would spoil the film. So I will only add that there are many intense moments, some full of pain and resilience, here. If you see any film on the big screen this year, make it this one. It deserves to be experienced that way.

I do want to add that Hushpuppy's father, Wink, is also played by a nonprofessional actor ( Dwight Henry) .He is utterly believable in his portrayal of a strong yet flawed man who is deeply loved by his daughter.

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I walked out of the theater Sunday completely awed. My eyes were swollen from the crying, my neck was sticky from the tears. I could even feel the color in my face separating into blotchy red and white patches. As a rule, I don't cry in public. The effect is just too humiliating. So if you look over in the theater and I'm unashamedly weeping, you know I have been absolutely emotionally compromised. I suspected Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) would be moving, but this... This was unearthing.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Beasts of the Southern Wild is director Benh Zeitlin's first feature film and Quvenzhané Wallis's acting debut. The film's plot is best summarized in Hushpuppy's (Wallis) own words at the end of the film: "...once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." The Bathtub, whose exact location is never clearly established, is a poverty-stricken rural area with a very tight-knit community. When a storm floods the Bathtub, Hushpuppy and those around her must find a way to survive, all whilst being chased by aurochs (which look like very large half-pigs-half-cows).

While the film was well-received by critics, I want to know why everyone isn't talking about this movie. Poetic, raw, magical... This film blew me away. All too-often the box office is flooded with either fluffy feel-good movies or depressing angst films that send viewers spiraling into an oblivion of darkness. Good films--the best films--can reach down into the tragedy of our existence, accurately portray the violence of our world, and rise from the pit with hope. Beasts is one of these films, waking and shaking you in your very bones.

Wallis's performance topped anything I've ever seen from anyone, let alone a five-year-old. If "heartwarming" wasn't one of the most overused words slapped onto movie covers, I'd use it now. From her first scene, Wallis has you wrapped around her little finger, drawing you in to her character's fierceness through the most beautifully delivered lines and powerful facial expressions to reach the screen in, well, ever.

The film itself was a visual stunner. Zeitlin's ability to use imagery instead of dialogue is masterful. His cinematography is breathtaking. What Terrence Malick attempts to do in Tree of Life (2011) with extensive scenes of cosmic glory, Zeitlin does seamlessly with sometimes-beautiful-sometimes-grotesque shots of life in the Bathtub.

And let's not forget the fantastic score, which somehow takes instrumental folk music and transforms it into a thing of inspiration. It was Mumford & Sons minus the lyrics plus all the emotional pull of any James Horner movie score. And it was composed by none other than the film's director, Benh Zeitlin, along with Dan Romer.

Beasts was flawless. Flawless, I tell you. There wasn't one thing at the end of the film that I wished was different. Just be sure to take a Kleenex box with you. I wish I had.

I wouldn't be surprised if this movie wipes out the Oscars. It had all the fairy-tale magic of The Fall (Tarsem Singh, 2006) and Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012), all the honesty and charm of Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006), and all the breathtaking cinematic effects of Tree of Life. But somehow, Beasts is still a thing of its own, a fictional story made all the more beautiful because it is true.

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