You’re My Friend, Kind of: Beasts of the Southern Wild

It is made of determined, unwanted tears, the smell of the earth after it rains, and the laughter of that old guy down the road who calls you ‘kid’.

The director, the crew and the players are clearly all people who appreciate the earth – what it gives and what it can take away. The film is ripe with both nature’s fierceness and its giving spirit; the way it always seems to let people find a way. Nature of another kind – human – gives the film its magic. Humans lost and found, humans laughing and crying, humans together and alone. Beasts of the Southern Wild goes back to nature, that of the earth and its people, to create a beautiful universe of feeling. An indelible magic. 

“In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.” In ten years, when kids go to film school, they gonna know: once there was a film shot in the back of beyond in Louisiana about a six year old girl, and it was one of the greatest films ever made.

Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) is 5-year old preternaturally wise ingénue who lives in the Bathtub with her equally determined father Wink (Dwight Henry). The Bathtub is a quaint and non-nonsense town cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee. When approaching storms (whether wind-and-rain or Wink’s fast-fading health) threaten her world, Hushpuppy must use her huge mind and huger heart to pull through. The “beasts” of the title are ancient creatures released from hibernation by the melting ice caps. Hushpuppy sees them coming. Some might ask if that means they’re really there. Here I will paraphrase another hero of magic and fiction: “Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?”

Beasts of the Southern Wild was the under-but-overdog of last year’s Academy Awards. I don’t have any energy left to be angry about what it lost out on, so you can read this attempt at satire if you wish to immerse yourself in the bitterness of one strange person who watches too many films. With that business over and done with, I can sit here right now and literally cry about how beautiful this film is. I mean literally. You ought to know why.

My first time seeing this film coincided with severe depression and the resulting suicidal thoughts, so its emotional power was doubled by one hundred. Watching humans in art battle and even embrace their suffering while you stagger through yours is an experience nothing can match, and I’m so happy that mine was with a film so powerful. You may not care about this or consider it your business, but the mastery of cinema can do extraordinary things to us, and I believe a piece of writing extolling the virtues of that is a good place for such a story. You saw into Hushpuppy’s heart, now you can see into mine. Just a little.

Director Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar adapted the screenplay from Alibar’s own one-act play, “Juicy and Delicious.” The result is strange magic, iron emotion and beautiful mystery. Characters seem universal and unique at once, pathetic and majestic. Hushpuppy has nothing to say after her father returns from an unexplained absence save “I learned lots of things while you were gone!” The film doesn’t play the “this abusive person is abusive” card, it shows that love is good and bad and ugly and amazing all at once. This is not an abused-child story. This is a human story, with all of its lovely pain. Wink might hit his daughter, but she hits him back and screams such hurtful things that she might as well have just as strong a hand. She’s enough of an adult to have her own house and look after herself for days on end, but enough of a child to set the place on fire when she’s mad and then hide in a cardboard box. In a million years, people should know her. Everyone like her. Every person who deals with this wonderful horrible thing called life with as much grace as they can manage. Most of humanity is amazing and a film like this reminds us.  You wonder how these people live or how they feel, and then one scene or even two words makes everything drop into place. Here’s one of those times: “No crying.” Or: “Sometimes you break something so bad, that it can’t be put back together.” A five year old can face that better than most adults. Including her father. “No, you probably live a hundred years more. Show me them guns!” This is the most subtle and strange parental love ever, I’ve never seen anything like it on film. When he finally asks her to lay down with him to sleep, you know how much it must mean to her. Completely aside from that skill in crafting words, Zeitlin and Alibar deserve praise from pole to pole for telling a story with a five year old protagonist. A female protagonist. Of colour. Whether or not equal representation in cinema interests you (it should), you’ve got to admit that’s a rare thing. Speaking of the justice side of things, not many films have you hating the rescuers. This one does. The people that invade the Bathtub to drag its inhabitants to the sterile “rescue centre” seems more horrible than any traditional villain. There’s no time for simplicity like that – ‘save someone and you’re good’ This can tell you that sometimes people don’t want or need rescuing. I believe the majority of first-world white humanitarian activists need to wrap their heads around that. But I digress – this film’s sadness and beauty is due in no small part to the word-wrangling of Alibar and Zeitlin.

… And in no small part to the performances. Wallis and Henry had never acted before. By the time this film is done with you, you won’t believe that. If you remember Quvenzhane Wallis as the token cute kid with a puppy-shaped purse at the Oscars, you’re about to find out why everyone ought to have been kneeling at her feet. Hers is a name I hope we will hear multiple times through the years. What’s that? Oh, right. It’s Kwuh-VEN-juh-nay. There you go. Miss Wallis is scrappy and gleaming from the first frame. Wallis was five when the film was shot, and yet you can see “I don’t know if I love my father” and other very adult emotions on her tiny face with no trouble. She can deliver the line “If Daddy kill me, I ain’t gonna be forgotten,” with a chilling calmness beyond the reach of actors in the business for longer than she’s been alive. She watches her father, seeing the stains of internal bleeding, and longs for her absent mother, before worrying whether “I broke everything.” If that doesn’t rip your heart in half, I don’t know what will. But don’t worry, seeing her smile will make it sing. Dwight Henry has the same perfect canvas for every emotion that Wallis does – he might yell at her or abandon her, but you know his heart is tied to hers through one look on his face as he watches her in their little boat, or him telling her to gleefully shout “I gotcha!” after catching a big fish. Thank God for characters like this, as imperfect as we all are. Wink is tragic instead of awful because he might not be able to look after her so well, but he can’t look after himself. So she puts her mama’s shirt like a blanket on her daddy – there is more human beauty and family love in those ten seconds than in other entire films.

I want to live in the Bathtub, I’ll learn to catch catfish with my bare hands if I must. Filth and ruin were never so beautiful. Ben Richardson’s handheld is like breathing rather than shaking. Alex DiGerlando and Dawn Masi’s visuals have the grit and grace of a gasoline rainbow. Shooting the actual back of beyond of Louisiana would be the only way to give this film the grit and grace it has, so that’s exactly what they did. Wrangling between cleanups for the BP oil spill, by the way. (Do you like my ironic simile now?) Ramshackle boats and houses and the sprawling wet world is the perfect symbol for the spirit of the Bathtub – you can knock as around and we’ll build ourselves right back up. You flood us and we’ll damn well live on water. Hushpuppy’s house is a miracle of scrambling and scribbling and scavenging, from the football helmet in the freezer to lighting the oven with a blowtorch. Sparklers and cheap fireworks are more beautiful and soul-lifting than any giant musical number you’ll ever see.

Speaking of soul-lifting, much of the credit for that must go to the score, written by Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin (damn it, is there anything that kid can’t do?) Hushpuppy’s triumphant trumpet tune is enough to raise goosebumps. High tinkles of piano and strings brings a fairytale or a ballet into a ruined bayou as Hushpuppy stands on her roof after the storm, like the princess of the floating village. It’s old timey but not twee, almost aching for a wonder that doesn’t exist – except perhaps in the Bathtub.

I don’t want to overuse such a syrupy and ponderous word as “magic” but I don’t know what else to say. I can’t say “Benh Zeitlin’s direction” or something like it – intangible feeling and tangible toil weave so tightly together on this film, that you can’t tell where the enchanted ends and the making began. Hushpuppy seemed to have been like a spirit as well as a character, working with the crew in every minute to make sure they told her story right. She is caring for a bird as though it were her own child, immediately we know there is something to her, a magic and strength, the same that exists in every leaf and lung and soil sod of the earth. This is a kid preparing for what is her apocalypse; the life she knows being dead. A microcosm of what we all do. Pretend it’s not the end. Whether the aurochs are real or part of Hushpuppy’s imagination doesn’t even matter, that’s when you know symbol and character collide perfectly. Beasts… they might be the aurochs, they might be the humans, we’re all beasts in the end; whether wide eyed owls or the squirming shrimps. Why can’t we look after each other like these people do? Is the world not one big Bathtub? Of course it is, of course it isn’t. Idealism and realism collide and dance. This film aligns the huge and the tiny. You watch your father convulse with God-knows-what ailment, the ice caps may as well be collapsing as far as you’re concerned. “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts… the entire universe will get busted.” It’s a powerful, beautiful, eerie way to look at how a child makes sense of things. She has more bravery than most men grown. She could stay in ignorant peace forever – but she knows you have to do painful things to stay true to what life is. You gotta stare down those aurochs right in the face. And they’ll bow. “You’re my friend, kind-of.” The tears started coming then. They still do.

“When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces. When I look too hard, it goes away… once there was a Hushpuppy, and she live with her daddy in the Bathtub”  Just like that, I run out of words.