Every year, the critics seem to fall in love with one horribly overrated film. Last year it was "The Artist," a derivative tale filmed in the long-defunct style of a silent movie. At least "The Artist" won points for capturing a certain style of filmmaking, but this year's candidate for most pretentious and overrated film, "The Beasts of the Southern Wild," almost defies description.
Anyway, I'll try. Don't expect any attempt here to create characters that have any relation to real people. "Beasts" is designed to enter the realm of myth. We're taken to a mythical land dubbed "The Bathtub," a Louisiana Bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a levee. The houses (if you can call them that), appear to be nothing more than ramshackle shelters, in what appears to be a post-Katrina environment.
Almost every critic seems to be taken in by the youngest actor ever to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar: six-year-old (now nine) Quevenzhané Wallis. Wallis (in the role of "Hushpuppy") really should be nominated for best acting in a horror film as she plays an emotionally distant, pyromaniac who is the victim of child abuse on the part of her father, Wink, who actually slaps the child, causing her to fall violently to the ground. If you can believe this, the rambunctious Hushpuppy retaliates in kind, by striking Wink, who briefly appears to lose consciousness.
Director Benh Zeitlin attempts to mitigate Wink's violent demeanor, by depicting him as some kind of "tough love" saint, who saves the child through a raging Katrina-like storm, after constructing a floating shelter out of flood debris. At one point, Crazy Wink fends off the storm by shooting at the clouds, reassuring the now scared child. Later, he hatches an ill-advised plan to drain salt water brought in by the storm surge, by dynamiting the levee. The bottom line is that Zeitlin wants it both ways: Wink is both a violent child abuser but underneath, a self-sacrificing and devoted father. How touching!
If this isn't ridiculous enough, the townspeople are all dysfunctional with drinking problems. After everyone is evacuated by FEMA-like stooges, Hushpuppy's comrades all make a beeline back to their ruined, condemned community. These salt of the earth are particularly good at sucking the heads of craw-fish. David Edelstein in New York Magazine puts it best when describing the denizens of the mythical Bathtub: "Late in the film, Hushpuppy's surrogate family is absurdly romanticized, their drunken dysfunction ennobled, as if living below sea level puts you on a higher spiritual plane."
Don't ask me to explain the meaning of the actual "beasts" of the film's title. In the beginning of the film, we learn that melting polar ice caps are releasing prehistoric creatures called "Aurochs." During a screening, I learned that a separate camera crew took ten days to film five-month-old pigs dressed up with horns, to suggest giant wild boars. Hushpuppy later bonds with the creatures after she returns to the "Bathtub" with a coterie of inebriated allies.
Wouldn't you know it that Wink has contracted a terminal illness and Hushpuppy is there for a grand send-off at the funeral pyre. That, dear friends, is "Beasts of the Southern Wild" in a nutshell. Everyone turns out to be wonderful in the end, including the former child abuser but now lovable (but terminally ill), Wink. And no one (including government "fiends") can stop the wonderful salt of the earth from getting back to their roots in the Bathtub, including the oh so lovable but hyperactive Hushpuppy.
This time, it's Sundance that must take principal responsibility for releasing this drivel to the world. On the other hand, every festival can't be perfect. Let's forgive Sundance for this misstep and pray they don't make the same mistake when next year's festival rolls around.
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