Beauty is terribly subjective. Just as the characters in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” were proclaiming their rural home to be “pretty,” I was scribbling the phrase “ruin porn” in my notebook.
But The Bathtub, a fictional lowland Delta region on the edge of a levee is their home, and home always harbors more allure to those who live in it. The principals, six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry), live in separate trailers, perched on stilts and surrounded by scrub brush, scrabbling chickens, discarded tires and miscellaneous jagged, rusty metal. One hopes they have the means to afford tetanus shots, but that seems unlikely. Their level of depression is extreme. And a storm looms on the horizon.
“Beasts” director Benh Zeitlin, co-writing with Lucy Alibar, successfully submerges us in the destitution of the story, which teeters uneasily between hard-bitten docudrama and mythological fantasy. Its heart is Hushpuppy, who narrates precociously, sharing wisdom and aping her father’s observations with the dropped Gs of the southern dialect. Her dad’s an alcoholic, and abusive, but in Hushpuppy he sees her mother, who he loved, but is no longer around. He’s also ailing, seemingly on the brink of death.
So our interest obviously focuses on the fate of this young, but resourceful ragamuffin girl, who talks to a lighthouse on the horizon as if it were her missing mother. Zeitlin’s nervous camera - shaky and handheld, for better or worse – frays the nerves as the impossibly stubborn Wink refuses to treat his sickness, or remove himself and his daughter from the intense rain that batters The Bathtub. He maneuvers his raft, built from the bed of an old pickup truck, through the floodwaters, to a group of friends who also refuse to leave, out of dogged, unreasonable pride for their wild and weathered land. They celebrate with booze and a seafood feast.
Zeitlin, however, stirs curiously ineffective hallucinogenic elements into his low country boil. Hushpuppy’s sort-of teacher, Miss Bathsheeba (Gina Montan) speaks of great creatures, aurochs, who roamed the land in prehistoric times. Real-life aurochs are ancestors of modern cattle, but Zeitlin shows them as massive, hybrid pig-like beasts with long, intimidating horns. They awaken from melted ice and rumble across the earth, the symbolism of their emergence muddled and distracting.
“Beasts” works better as a tale of survival rooted in our concern for Hushpuppy’s future. The cinematography is bleak, to match the story. Wallis’ performance is key to the film’s effectiveness – it’s highly unusual for a child actor to be so natural in front of a camera, and the chemistry between her and Henry is the movie’s strongest element. Zeitlin has crafted an odd film here, admirable in its ambition and imagination. But this story and particular filmmaking style would be more effective had it focused on the relationship between parent and child and not cluttered itself with pseudo-profundities.