Movie Review
Now Playing at the Cedar Lee Theatre
By Mansfield Frazier
I have to fess up: I’ve been about as giddy with anticipation as a schoolboy looking forward to Christmas as I’ve eagerly waited for Benh Zeitlin’s multi award-winning film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, to hit the big screen. And, while the film certainly isn’t for everyone (after all, who can account for tastes?), when I finally got to view the groundbreaking new genre of filmmaking my high expectations were not only met, they were greatly exceeded.
Beasts is in a category all by itself, and while I won’t go so far as to say it’s the best film I’ve ever seen… I really can’t recall any other movie I’ve enjoyed — and respected — more. The film truly is an important masterwork by a young filmmaking genius.
Set in a fictional, gritty (and somewhat fantastical) Louisiana Delta community called “The Bathtub,” the film is centered around the character of Hushpuppy, a six-year-old black girl who is learning about life, the universe, and what the future holds — for her and for us as well — from her hard-edged, hard-drinking — and some would say slightly demented — father Wink, who we eventually discover is terminally ill.
Wink attempts to ready his daughter for self-sufficiency by such methods as showing her how to reach over the side of a boat into the murky waters that surround their very humble abode and catch catfish with her bare hands. His “boat,” however, is the bed of an old Chevy pickup truck, bolted onto 55-gallon drums as pontoons for flotation, and outfitted with an old, leaky motor. Like everything else in the world they inhabit, it’s ramshackle… but another way of looking at their circumstance is they — similar to all of their neighbors — are simply excellent (indeed, world-class) recyclers.
To put the film into context of today, a few weeks ago a news story broke regarding a chunk of ice twice the size of Manhattan breaking off a glacier due to global warming. This real life incident was mirrored by a scene in the film where glaciers break apart and begin to melt due to global warming… causing the seas to rise, thus inundating low-lying communities like “The Bathtub.”
The ice melt also releases a herd of prehistoric creatures (the Beasts in the title) that had been frozen in the ice for eons. These wild boar-like creatures — the size of buffaloes but with wicked-looking tusks protruding from their foreheads — spring back to life and begin marauding across the delta, destroying everything in their path.
They serve as symbols of the hellish future filmmaker Zeitlin is attempting to caution us to avoid as we continue our seemingly headlong rush to despoil the planet while ignoring all of the abundant warning signs of a coming apocalypse. These beasts are the apocalypse made corporeal.
Some cinematic purists posit film is not the proper medium to send messages… but they are totally, absurdly wrong. Zeitlin’s work (which he humbly calls a “community art project”) is chock full of well-timed and succinctly delivered messages: The residents of “The Bathtub,” black and white, young and old, all live in harmony with each other and their surroundings; they have a real sense of shared community… a community they’re attempting to protect from outside encroachments not of their making; but, like many of us, they feel they are failing.
By most capitalist standards these certainly are poor people, but they don’t seem to know or much care about it, and the robust lives they live give the lie to the notion that money equates happiness. They eat and drink well from the crops and animals they raise, the abundant shellfish they catch, and the homebrew they distill; they educate in their customs and the ways of the natural world… and all they ask is to be left alone.
They definitely (and defiantly) don’t care to live like the folks whose belching, polluting smokestacks — from oil refineries and chemical plants — can be seen far off in the distance. But their little insular world is being changed for the worse by those emitters of greenhouse gases and toxic by-products, and the film’s message is clear that no one will have the luxury of being left alone for too much longer unless we cease and desist.
Zeitlin never went to filmmaking school. He’s the son of Steve Zeitlin, the famed New York City folklorist who founded City Lore: the New York Center for Urban Culture in 1986. It was “the first organization in the United States devoted expressly to the documentation, preservation, and presentation of urban folk culture.” So the younger Zeitlin came by his passion for telling the stories of ordinary people in an honest manner: He inherited the gift.
After Hurricane Katrina Zeitlin went to Louisiana to make a short film about the devastation, and wound up moving there. Beasts, his second film — his first short film, Glory at Sea‘ also won awards — is done in a self-described “do-it-yourself style” where he cobbled together sets from whatever was at hand and hired non-actors from the surrounding area. A general casting call netted him the film’s star, Quvenzhané Wallis, who plays Hushpuppy.
In an interview, Zeitlin said, “We had several teams around the state looking for people, and her first audition was really weird — she actually barely made the cut to get into callbacks. But the moment she came into her callback, it was mind-blowing. I mean, she was incredible. But she was the first kid who came in, so I didn’t realize that we weren’t about to see 20 kids that were all, you know, superhuman actors. But as reality set in, it was like, ‘Wow, we have our movie.’ She is the movie. We’d never seen that kind of focus and wisdom and poise from someone that young. I wanted the character to be as young as we could possibly push her, and she was five when she came in, which was below our cutoff. She actually snuck in.”
Zeitlin’s film has won honors at every film festival in the world this year, and if Beasts doesn’t garner a handful of Oscar nominations then something is seriously wrong with the nominating process. If you like movies about real people — instead of flicks about vampires, aliens, super-heroes and computer-generated androids — then this is a film you probably won’t want to miss. It’s truly an amazing and original work of filmmaking art that people will be talking about — and attempting to emulate — for decades to come.
[Bottom photo by Jess Pinkham.]
Beasts of the Southern Wild is now playing at the Cedar Lee Theatre. For showings visit http://ClevelandCinemas.com. Also check out http://BeastsOfTheSouthernWild.com.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.
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