Beasts of the Southern Wild

Plot synopsis:
In a forgotten yet defiant bayou community called the Bathtub, cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee, six-year-old Hushpuppy(Quvenzhané Wallis) exists on the brink of orphan-hood. Her mother is long gone, and her beloved father Wink(Dwight Henry) is a wildman on a perpetual spree. When Wink is home, he lives under a different roof: Wink in a rusted-out shack, and Hushpuppy in a trailer propped on two oil drums. More often than not, Hushpuppy is left to her own devices on their isolated compound filled with feral wildlife, where she perceives the natural world to be a fragile web of living, breathing, squirting things, wherein the entire universe depends on everything fitting together just right.While life in the Bathtub is defined by both resilience and celebration, at the local elementary school(boat), Hushpuppy's no-nonsense teacher, Miss Bathsheba(Gina Montana), educates her ragtag students about natural selection, global warming, and the huge ecological shifts that have pitted the Bathtub on the front line for extinction. "Learn to live with one another, and adapt!" she instructs. "Y'all better learn how to survive, now..."Reality crashes down on Hushpuppy's world when Wink comes down with a mysterious illness, and nature
begins to spiral out of control. A massive storm brews, the ice caps melt, and Wink shakes on the ground at her feet after a mere punch. Hushpuppy becomes convinced that the science attacking her environment and her father's insides are inextricably linked.Half a world away, in an unforeseen result of these sudden global shifts, fierce prehistoric beasts thaw out of the ice, righting themselves on firm ground after centuries immobile.As the waters rise around the bayou shrimping town, while all the practical people run for higher ground, Wink and his brigade of drunken sweethearts insist on staying put. He and Hushpuppy are forced to hole up together in Wink's rickety shack and ride out the hurricane, Wink firing a shotgun into the sky, defying the forces of nature. When morning breaks, the two find the Bathtub destroyed, empty, and almost totally submerged.Wink and Hushpuppy collect the other holdouts, and as is custom, greet their situation with celebration instead of remorse: They throw a party with all the remaining shrimp, crab, and beer. Miss Bathsheba kills the mood by
reminding Wink that the excess of salt water in the Bathtub has likely killed all the flora and fauna that had
provided their sustenance; they could be consuming the last the bayou has to offer. Wink takes a swig of
beer and shrugs her off: "I got it under control". But his attempts to teach Hushpuppy to survive on her own in this altered environment fall short; a lesson on how to fish with bare hands leaves her in pain.The next morning, Hushpuppy is awoken by Wink and company sneaking out with a giant garfish filled with
explosives, the crackpot plan being to blow up the levee keeping all the water in, and drain out their homeland. Miss Bathsheba, the only one who understands the science of why this is a very bad idea, stops Wink, but not Hushpuppy, from executing the kamikaze scheme. The results are disastrous: The drained Bathtub, now resembling, a mushy, scorched-earth land formerly bursting with plants and animals, is now dead. Though Wink refuses to accept it, Hushpuppy can tell that the fabric of nature has unraveled around her, and that the "unending" bounty of the bayou is over.The fearsome beasts now cut looming shadows against the horizon and charge their way across continents, snarling, growling, knife-sharp horns glimmering as they head south...Soon afterwards, suddenly reminded of their existence, the government subjects the Bathtub to a mandatory
evacuation, and men with bullhorns and strange accents whisk away Hushpuppy, Wink, and the other residents. They are taken to a sterile, gloomy refugee camp hospital, where everyone looks as bleak as "fish in a fish tank without water", according to Hushpuppy. In the care of the state, she is immediately dressed in unnatural-feeling "acceptable" clothing with the other unruly Bathtub kids. Confronted with his diagnosis from the doctors, Wink tries to give Hushpuppy away. Furious, Hushpuppy refuses, and Wink must finally tell her the truth: He's dying.At last, it hits Hushpuppy that her father isn't the maniacal superman she believed him to be. Out of his natural environment, he begins coughing up blood, and asks his friends to take him to the only place he knows as home. Unable to watch Wink on his deathbed, Hushpuppy flees across the water toward a light in the distance she believes to be her mother. A mysterious boatman plucks her out of the sea and takes her to his favorite nightclub, the Elysian Fields Floating Catfish Shack: "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS". As Hushpuppy wanders this ethereal paradise, out of the kitchen steps a woman who stares at her with eyes like hers. "Let me show you a magic trick", she tells the awed Hushpuppy. Whipping up some killer grits n' gator and dishing out no-nonsense advice, she gives Hushpuppy a moment of love she's been looking for her whole life. But as they dance together, Hushpuppy realizes she has a duty to return to her father and The Bathtub before it's too late for both of them.The creatures suddenly appear on the parched crest before the dried-up bayou, a tiny girl in their crosshairs. They charge up behind her, when suddenly she swirls around to face them with eyes as fearless as theirs. They share a moment of primal understanding, and the beasts kneel before her. She goes on her way...Back in the Bathtub, Hushpuppy shares a last supper of fried gator with Wink in his broken shack. Having reconciled with her father and accepted nature's chosen path, she returns to her friends and family, a hardened warrior, and they parade into the Southern Wild as water laps at their feet.("Long Synopsis" from the Festival de Cannes press kit for Beasts of the Southern Wild).

Tags: psychedelic, magical realism, storytelling, sentimental

Review:
Containing outstanding performances, great cinematography, and a fantastic score, the film is just so engrossing.Hushpuppy feels her connection not only to nature and animals, but also to the prehistoric era, represented throughout the film by her interest in cave drawings and—more fancifully—prehistoric beasts called aurochs that have been released from the ice caps and make their way toward the Bathtubat least in Hushpuppy's mind.
The difference between what's real and what lives in the imagination of our six-year-old heroine is not always clear, but it's all delivered with a beautifully assured sense of wonder.Beasts of the Southern Wild unfolds through Hushpuppy's eyes, and it's a sight to behold: sometimes wondrous, often disordered and dysfunctional.
Yet the hardscrabble people of Bathtub still find a way to channel their joy, even though they've been forgotten.It's all the more impressive that such a confident and resourceful film comes from a first-timer; writer-director Benh Zeitlin previously impressed Sundance audiences with the Hurricane Katrina inspired short "Glory at Sea." He collaborated on the screenplay for "Beasts" with Lucy Alibar and worked with a cast and crew of mostly non-professionals (both Wallis and Henry make genuinely astonishing screen debuts).
To Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), the islands of southern Louisiana are a magical place filled with lucky people who do not have to live like cowards behind the levees and only get one holiday a year.
Magical realism is far more acceptable and preferable to an audience than what could arguably be termed child cruelty.Hushpuppy and her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), live in an area called 'The Bathtub'.
There are echoes of ourselves in all these people in their craziness or compassion, or their uneducated wisdom (or lack of wisdom which then depends on luck and instinct).In short it's quite a ride, and the leading character is a little girl who now is up for an Academy Award nomination for best actress, with the only question about that being the weirdly simple and true question--how much is she acting, how much is she just being herself with amazing transparency on the camera?
Well, the same could be said of lots of adult actors who are really just themselves over and over, and so you really can watch "Beasts" for the stellar and heartwarming effort by Quvenzhané Wallis.There are other performances startling for their gritty (or downright filthy) realism, including the girl's father.
The film was shot on an actual island like this, though it given a fictional name (nicknamed the Bathtub by the characters).You can also love this movie for its metaphors.
She has her own wisdom and is, like all children, taking things quite literally.At first the hand-held camera-work and insufficient light-fill to illuminate the deep shades gave me the impression that this was a documentary style movie, a story reporting the lives of a group of people living off the grid in some southern state of the United States.
But when I understood that the "Beasts" of the title was not a judgment of the movie's humans and their poverty, their ignorance, their unsophistication- but only an alternate noun for "animals" which the protagonists calls both her pets and humans alike, I started seeing the movie for what it really is: A dream, a fantasy, an imaginary story that merged with the contemporary awareness of global warming, and so a low tech sci-fi prediction of how the world may soon become.With that key I read most character's actions: the father figure who needs to train his child to survive, inciting her "to show her guns" and be self assured; the woman who teaches children the use of herbs to cure, the meaning of magic and mythology; the tolerance of the other adults for what, in a parallel reality, would definitively been child abuse.
All this is righteously done to prepare the children to survive in a world that was(is?) going from merely hard to impossible.Wink's seemingly unsentimental and insensitive behavior towards the little wee child makes then perfect sense and thus his letting go when she can keep at bay, the Aurochs (a metaphor for her still childlike imagination) and her ability to step out of that world and into that of an adult ("I've got to take care of mine now") is the proof that she had grown up enough to survive on her own.Looking back to it, this movie is a miracle as improbable as that of La Vita é Bella, where Benigni infused humor in a story about the Holocaust without becoming offensive or demeaning.
Beasts of a Southern Wild is able to merge a child's world with that of an adult; to make us see how the effects of global warming will challenge the lives of many; it is a comment and a reminder of Katrina, its victims and consequences; finally it is a poetic way of describing the world and its inhabitants, escaping the ugliness and despair of certain realities by converting it into hope, survival and beauty..
I do not find ignorance, squalor and stupidity to be noble.This movie was incoherent and jerky, had no clear plot line, glorified degraded living and had no redeeming value.IMDb insists that I write 10 lines of commentary about it, but I accurately summarized it in my first line.I suggest that unless you want to watch people living in filth and ignorance, stay away from this film.I realize that the title was meant to be a play on wildlife documentaries, but it seems to me that it is more accurate perhaps than it intended to be.
We focus on a precocious six year old named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), who lives a cold, broken life in the Bathtub with her physically and mentally abusive father Wink (Dwight Henry) and her frequently absent mother.We learn because of melting ice caps, the Bathtub is approaching certain unavoidable doom and will soon be consumed by rising sea levels and the only ones who will survive after the event will be the strongest.
While this morose future is pending, we primarily focus on the overwhelming between Hushpuppy and Wink, as Wink's father-figure ways are poor and unnerving and how he isn't completely sure how do deal with her daughter's curiosity, intrepid personality.To begin with, while I can not say I enjoyed Beasts of the Southern Wild as much as some others who have gone on to speak very highly of the picture, I can say that this is one of the most auspicious and ambitious directorial debuts in quite sometime.
The photography here is absolutely marvelous, and we get a sense that this film is not about narrative consistency or specific plot points, but more about evoking the imagination of the director and the writer.What this sets up are numerous metaphors that sometimes feel like an abrupt change in direction, mainly because we see that some things should be taken from the perspective as fueling the narrative, while others should be taken at an allegorical level.
In one scene of strength and power is Wink giving her confidence and motivation by asking her, "who's the man?" with her energetically replying, "I'm the man!" The scene could've corny, but it is buoyed by the two talented leads and the fierce writing of Alibar and Zeitlin.More and more lately am I seeing films with a child-star left to carry the weight of an entire picture, and if they do a modest job, I feel sort of upset that I must criticize their work (a good example would be the capable Thomas Horn in the incapable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).
Dwight Henry's role is too a difficult one to pull off, yet he handles the almost bipolar nature of the father character effectively and seriously.Beasts of the Southern Wild works on many levels, but the biggest level it succeeds on is how it shows a society of poor, underprivileged characters who are not willing to change not because of stubborn behavior but because of immense dedication to their world.
This film tells the story of a girl whose life is turned upside down by a flood in her village."Beasts of the Southern Wild" looks like a fairytale or fantasy adventure from the poster, but in fact the film cannot be further from it.
Well that is basically "Beasts of the Southern Wild," except the characters are not blindfolded, it lasts an interminable 95 minutes, and there are some laughably bad fantastical elements thrown into the mix.If only the character Hushpuppy lived in this meta-spiritual world the film might have worked.
An undeniably lyrical and poetic work from Benh Zeitlin, written with Lucy Alibar and based on her stage play, 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' has many passages of joyous originality, and the film ably captures the child's perspective in Hush Puppy's mostly intelligible narration, but remains stuck there for the duration.
It is a story of a father and his precocious daughter caught in a tough life in Louisiana's poverty-stricken bayou area called "The Bathtub." When a big storm (Hurricane Katrina?) devastates their community, their already upside-down life goes into a further tumble.The lead actors here are not really professional actors.
There are plenty of films that capture this despair effectively and with great sympathy.However, "Southern Wilds" is little more than a musical montage of child abuse, neglect, cruelty to animals, and an utter disdain for any sense of meaning outside of this twisted culture of madness.Consider that there is not a book, a newspaper or a magazine in any scene.
Watching this, like Slumdog Millionaire and Precious, I was glad to see handsome actors and beautiful actresses of different hues, sizes, and environments represented on film, but saddened to see that it is still necessary to be raped(Precious), wallow through Port-o-Let feces (Slumdog), or dance and smile at filth (Beasts of the Southern Wild) to be seen.
"Beasts of the Southern Wild" is a very pretty film to look at, but kind of a hard fantasy to believe.It starts out strong, but ends up more than a little limp.
Unfortunately, it keeps getting harder and harder to suspend disbelief.A good part of the movie is voice-over by the "Hushpuppy" character, and I'm kind of sad to say I can't believe Quvenzhané Wallis actually SPOKE that role.
If the role had been played by a young girl who failed to encapsulate the character and couldn't achieve the emotional intensity Wallis did, then we may never even have heard of Beasts of the Southern Wild.It's not so much that Beasts is a bad film, it just sacrifices a lot in it's effort to be original.
Faced with both her hot-tempered father's fading health and melting ice-caps that flood her ramshackle bayou community and unleash ancient aurochs, six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) must learn the ways of courage and love.I am so glad that Quvenzhané Wallis has been nominated for best actress.
It didn't help my opinion of the movie much that I thought the acting of 9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis didn't strike me as any better than "decent" for a girl of her age, despite all of the rave reviews I had heard to the contrary.Why you should see it:While I don't anticipate any one of you being able to empathize all that strongly with the living squalor in which the protagonist of this film finds herself, I do imagine some of you can relate to her loss of a parent.
Beasts of the Southern Wild features some spectacular acting from 6-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis and 50-year-old Dwight Henry (which is amazing considering neither one had acted before), but the movie tries to be too deep at times and it loses its raw, realistic power.
It is well written and directed and, for a cast of relatively unknowns, the acting is excellent with young actress Quvenzhane Wallis shining as lead character Hushpuppy.It seems just by scrolling through the reviews that this is a love it/hate it film, with just as many negative reviews as positive ones.
It is interspersed with save- the-environment messages, incoherent dialogue between characters, and apparent glorification of some of the darker things in life (e.g. death).Centered around a girl (Hushpuppy) and her relationship with her dad, this is a story of how one father trains his daughter to be strong and unfazed by whatever comes her way.This film attempts to make up for its lack of a plot by casting talented child actor Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy.
She delivers an impeccable performance that tugs on my heartstrings even as the movie simultaneously dulled my mind.There were a few positives to take from this film: (1) Brilliant father-child acting, (2) Good cinematography (although some would argue that the shaky-camera technique was nauseating), (3) Good & realistic settingUnfortunately, they weren't enough to paper over its failings: (1) Weak/non-existent plot, (2) Incoherent dialogue, (3) When the dialogue was coherent, parts of it didn't make sense.
Oh what a breath of fresh air when on his first try, an unknown director produces something as superb as "Beasts of the Southern Wild." Benh Zeitlin in his first feature film, which he co-wrote with Lucy Alibar, remarkably creates a stunning, and imaginative world for viewers where characters must learn survival and courage through isolation from the world.
It revolves around a six-year-old named Hushpuppy (Wallis) who lost her mother at a very young age and lives with her father Wink (Henry).
The film focuses on Hushpuppy growing up at the tender age of six as prehistoric creatures known as aurochs are also let loose, by the drastic temperature change, and make their way to the 'Bathtub'.It is unclear when the movie takes place and if the 'beasts of the southern wild' (the aurochs) are real or figments of Hushpuppy's imagination.
Dwight Henry as her unsympathetic father also creates a fully realized character and their volatile relationship enhances an otherwise extremely grim and despairing film.Beasts of the Southern Wild may not totally succeed in its goals, but the film boasts solid filmmaking and its raw intensity with its serious subject matter make it a noble effort worth seeing, especially for the talents of Zeitlin and Little Miss Wallis, who will undoubtedly have a bright future ahead of them.
Played by Quvenzhané Wallis ( Hushpuppy ) and Dwight Henry ( Wink), Benh Zeitlin's masterpiece is telling us the story of the life we could have had.Beasts Of The Southern Wild, left the audience speechless.
Quvenzhané Wallis done a really good job (most of the time), and i guess that if one does deserved the academy award for best leading role, i would be between her and Emmanuelle Riva.The problem with this movie, for me, is that it is always on the edge between creating a dreamlike atmosphere of anguish and despair mixed with childish fantasies and a gritty, realistic depiction of the lives of the people of the bathtub - to the point where sometimes i've found myself lost in what's the real message that's going on most of the scenes.
A little gem of a film, it boasts superior performances by an amateur cast.In the Bayou country (and narrated from her point of view), a rebellious, young girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), has a very personalized vision of life in her world where there is a natural order of humans and wild, prehistoric beasts who rule the land.
Set in a Louisiana Bayou community known as the 'Bathtub', a little girl named Hushpuppy and her father live their days surrounded by animals and braving out fierce storms.
Hushpuppy's vivid imagination is set on fire as the personal troubles of her father and the community collide into a realistic adventure.Zeitlin's film not only produces an analytical account of living in the modern world but also brings out a star turning performance by Quvenzhane Wallis, who has just become the youngest Oscar nominee in the history of the awards.
I was naturally curious to see how a nine-year-old could have landed an Oscar nomination as Best Leading Actress, and clearly director Benh Zeitlin found a gifted child in Quvenzhané Wallis, who was actually only five during filming.
Intense, Inspiring, Beautiful, Bold and Amazingly Acted as well as Directed and Presented, Beasts of the Southern Wild is an inspiringly emotional movie which really shows the meaning of surviving without sadness and is as good as it is because of the amazing acting from Quvenzhane Wallis and Dwight Henry and the immense work made by Director Benh Zeitlin to make such an inspiring and unique movie.The Story which is based on a stage play ''Juicy And Delicious'' by Lucy Alibar is about a Six Year Old Poverty-struck Child named Hushpuppy(Wallis) and her arrogent and hot-tempered father Wink(Henry) and their lives in a remote, poor area, and although they are'nt rich, they still have fun with what they have.
I watched this Film as soon as i saw Wallis's nomination in the Oscar for Best Female Actress and after seeing this performance by a 9 year- old girl, i think she totally deserved the nod.
Watching or rather experiencing BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is 'like looking in on another universe through a keyhole.' The film is visual poetry, illuminating a unique corner of the world and making it a mystical magic message.
Alibar and director Benh Zeitlin adapted the play to a screenplay, carrying through the same themes of loss and strength, all set in a mythical world that's as brutal as it is beautiful: it is now related through the eyes of a small girl in Bathtub, Louisiana and is about people having the courage to love and defend the people and place they call home.Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), an undauntable six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world.