In the midst of all this revelry is Hushpuppy, a 6-year-old girl (Quvenzhané Wallis, who was actually 6 during filming) trying to figure out her place in the world. Like a mix of Scout from “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Max from “Where the Wild Things Are,” she greets everyone with either an inquisitive smile or a fierce scowl, an explosive range of emotions she’s inherited from her somewhat-there, mostly not father Wink (Dwight Henry, a baker in his first acting role). He wholeheartedly believes in the idea of the Bathtub, refusing to evacuate the area even though the police say so. And because Hushpuppy’s mother is gone, it’s just the two of them—much to Wink’s chagrin.
So for meals, school, getting to and from her trailer—because she and Wink live separately, in adjacent mobile homes—Hushpuppy is basically on her own. In this land of trees, hay, cement blocks, hogs and birds and flowers, she’s their princess, holding chicks up to her ear to hear their heartbeat. “All the time everywhere, everybody’s hearts are beating,” she says, part of a musing, curious voiceover narration that continues throughout the film. “Sometimes they be talking in codes,” she notes, and it’s part of Hushpuppy’s role in this world to figure that code out.
Perhaps it’s only the ego, innocence, and narcissism of youth that can crack that code (much like the questions Terrence Malick posed in last year’s “The Tree of Life”), because soon it becomes Hushpuppy’s responsibility to take care of her father after a huge storm comes, Wink gets sick, and Louisiana authorities start remembering the Bathtub exists. “We got the prettiest place on earth,” the residents of the Bathtub say, but nothing can stay pretty forever. That’s not how the world works.
What director Benh Zeitlin, who also co-wrote the film with Lucy Alibar (who wrote the original play the film is based on), has done with “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is capture a sense of America that is still wild and free, that can still be defined by parades, drinking, and fireworks. (And the film certainly has its champions; it won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.) Jobs don’t matter in the Bathtub; neither do society’s rules. The community is a family, but there’s a primal savagery that can’t be denied, either; at school, Hushpuppy and her peers learn that “every animal is made out of meat,” like the gigantic aurochs (prehistoric cattle, huge and with very formidable horns) that thunder across the wilderness toward the Bathtub. (Yes, you have to take that magical realism element with a bit of open-minded acceptance.) They were powerful once, and now they’re not—and as much as the residents of the Bathtub revel in their independence, Hushpuppy knows it’s a rapid descent into the shackles of modernity. We’re meat, too, you know.
“When it all goes quiet behind my eyes,” Hushpuppy says, “I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces.” Those pieces may be irredeemably falling apart, but in that rush to action is where Wallis shines, stomping around in a mismatched outfit, hoping for magic to save her father, and with a permanent glare etched on her face. Whether caught in their flooding trailer in the middle of a thunderstorm or trapped in a bracingly sterile hospital, Wallis never loses her intensity or focus. When she snaps at her father, “I’m the man!”, it’s not a laughable moment but a shockingly believable one. Hushpuppy, as young as she is, chooses to forge an identity that straddles her father’s recklessness and her own need for recognition and appreciation.
It’s a heartbreaking desire that culminates most poignantly in a scene in the middle of the ocean, when Hushpuppy and the other Bathtub girls her age visit a floating brothel. In the women there they find the mothers they never had, dancing together in the soft, muted light of misplaced desire. As the ladies in their nightgowns envelop the girls in their raggedy outfits, swaying back and forth, the scene is breathtaking in its sadness.
But at times “Beasts of the Southern Wild” seems too forgiving of its characters’ poor decisions, and too willing to fall back on Malick-like choices—scenes of crumbling glaciers, caterpillars transforming into butterflies, etc.—as segues for scenes that otherwise would have no continuity. They’re beautiful, but sometimes it feels like Zeitlin is cutting corners, allowing his characters more leeway than necessary.
Those are small quibbles, though, when so much of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is visceral and exhilarating, a practically lurid visual feast. It’s not flawless, but even its imperfections are visually stimulating and emotionally thought-provoking, a triumph for Zeitlin, Wallis, and everyone else involved.
