Beasts of the Southern Wild

Or, Auroch paper scissors.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is not so much a narrative as a collection of images and scenes and character sketches, an attempt to capture a place and time rather than a story per se. In this case, director Benh Zeitlin wants to place us in a grindingly poor, off-the-grid community living on an island called "The Bathtub" off the Louisiana coast. 

Beasts has a Biblical flood (complete with an Ark and animals), and an invasion of extinct cattle straight out of the imagination of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old girl through whose eyes the audience views this world.

Everything that I've said about the movie so far makes it sound like a Terence Malick movie. Malick makes beautiful movies that make you feel just like you were there...even if watching it's kind of boring and often doesn't make much sense.

For a first-time director with a minuscule budget and a cast of unknowns headed by a six-year-old, Beasts is pretty impressive. But I have to say that the critical French-kissing that it has received is kind of a mystery to me. Many of the reviews can't really seem to say what exactly it is they like. When reviews start waxing all poetic and vague, my BS detector starts beeping. When they declare, as The New Yorker's David Denby did, that its narrative incoherence was actually necessary because if the film made sense it would actually have been worse, that's when it goes into the red.

The only explanation I have is that the dreck that comes out of Hollywood is so mind-numbingly similar that anything that smacks of originality looks like genius, and on that score I have to concede the point to the French-kissing reviewers.

If you asked me whether this movie showed promise, I'd say absolutely, tons. I can't wait to see what Zeitlin does next. If you asked me if Wallis was a good actress, I'd say she was cute, why don't we let her grow up a bit and see if she turns into Dakota Fanning? But Best Picture and Best Director for a first-timer and Best Actress for a six-year-old? Has the critical establishment lost its collective mind? It's one movie. It's too soon. Prizes like this should cap a successful career–not begin one and risk killing it by ego inflation.

So, at the risk of getting an Internet drubbing, I'm going to be the kid calling out the emperor: this film is pretentious, patronizing poverty porn.

No doubt, to a New Yorker like Zeitlin (hey, I'm one too), rural poverty in Louisiana seems downright charming–accents! levees! crawfish!–but like Slumdog Millionaire, I feel like Beasts of the Southern Wild tells us more about our illusions than ourselves. Of course it's true that money can't buy happiness, but to delude your rich, pampered modern self that it's much better to live in poverty and squalor so you can enjoy the spiritual richness is a bit much. 

I'm not telling you that you're not allowed to enjoy it because it's not politically correct, but I think you should ask yourself why you like it. Beasts is like the film equivalent of a Renaissance Fair. If you go into it realizing that there was no dentistry or flush toilets in the real middle ages, you're fine–but in that case, it's not really a soaring religious experience.

Again, let me repeat that it's promising pretentious, patronizing poverty porn, so if you liked the movie we can at least agree on that. But best movie of the year? There, we'll just have to agree to disagree.