There’s never been a movie quite like Beasts of the Southern Wild. You can easily identify the component parts – it’s a mix of fable, apocalypse drama and coming-of-age story – but they’ve never been combined just like this before. The ingredients are familiar, but the meal isn’t. Throw in an unconventional south Louisiana setting and a Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) aesthetic, and you’ve got the makings of something new and special.
The film takes place in the Bathtub, an island off the coast of Louisiana that’s not quite real but not quite unreal, either. Trapped on the wrong side of a floodwall, the region is disappearing under rising waters, but a vibrant community persists there, refusing to abandon their homes in the face of looming disaster.
There are obvious real-world inspirations for the Bathtub, but it straddles the line between the realistic and the fantastical. It’s grounded in the vivacious culture of Louisiana but throws into the mix half-mythical creatures and the texture of a folktale.
“It’s a heightened reality,” writer-director Benh Zeitlin (of the short Glory at Sea) said of the film’s world. “There’s no place in the world that exists that is the Bathtub, but it’s built on a real thing. Every part of the culture exists somewhere in south Louisiana, every piece of every house is something we found somewhere in south Louisiana.”
He’s not kidding. The sets and props are built largely out of what the crew could scavenge in the area, jury-rigging whatever was needed out of junk. The resulting constructions give the film a look that’s all its own, yet strangely plausible. One of the characters uses a boat fashioned out of the bed of a pickup truck.
“The idea was to get out there and build things the way the characters would, and they don’t have any money,” said Zeitlin. “We had sets that were constructed entirely out of garbage we found in the woods around where we were shooting.”
Central to the film is the father-daughter pair of Wink and Hushpuppy, respectively played by Dwight Henry and Quvenzhané Wallis, both newcomers. The setup of a father and child facing down the end of their world recalls The Road but the tone of the film couldn’t be farther from Cormac McCarthy’s unrelenting bleakness. It is perhaps the most joyous disaster movie ever made.
The fierce bond between dad and daughter is the emotional center of the film, as father Wink – whose health is deteriorating with the land around him – tries to prepare 6-year-old Hushpuppy to survive on her own.
What’s amazing is that both Henry and Wallis are nonprofessional actors in their first roles; Henry was cast because he owns a New Orleans bakery where Zeitlin would hang out during pre-production. But they make up for training in life experience, having themselves lived through much of what their characters do.
“I was 2 years old when my mom and dad had to put me on the roof of the house in the Lower Ninth Ward when Hurricane Betsy came and flooded the whole ward,” said Henry. “Everything that I do in real life, the businesses that I’m building, is something to pass on to my children … and I brought that same energy and that same passion to the movie.”
Wallis is even more direct. When asked how she captured Hushpuppy’s resiliency, she simply said, “That’s me.”
Life mirrored art in more ways than one. The first day of shooting coincided with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and the town where the production was based became the center of BP’s cleanup operations. The fishing-dependent area was facing the real and immediate threat of extinction, lending the film a palpable sense of loss – and endurance in the face of it.
It’s a loosely plotted, episodic film, more interested in atmosphere and character than in narrative, but it adds up to a compelling, deeply moving whole. It’s a tragic film that’s nonetheless defiantly uplifting, a movie that acknowledges darkness without being overwhelmed by it. The final shot is one of the most rousing things I’ve ever seen.
“The film is almost a jazz funeral – no matter what’s happening, no matter how tragic it is, you don’t let it keep you down, and you celebrate anyway,” said Zeitlin. “It’s a refusal to feel sorry for oneself and refusal to be crushed by the weight of tragedy.”
Beasts of the Southern Wild is currently playing in limited release.
rgifford@umdbk.com
