"Beasts of the Southern Wild" (2012)

“When I die, the scientists of the future, they’re gonna find it all.  They’re gonna know, once there was a Hushpuppy, and she live with her daddy in the Bathtub.”

      Voice-over by Hushpuppy, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

The gritty, moving “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a small movie of mythic proportions, just like Hushpuppy, the remarkable character played by 6-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis.  It’s a slice-of-life about a corner of American culture that is rarely seen and often ignored, told from the eyes of this feisty and reflective little girl in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  It’s both rousing and gentle, startlingly brutal and then warmly inclusive, funny and melancholy, a realistic portrait of extreme American poverty and a fantasy that ponders the very universe. It observes the resilience of a tight-knit, rowdy group of people who can roll with any disaster (if it doesn’t kill them first).

Hushpuppy is an old soul in a child’s body.  She sees the discord in the world around her and accepts it as normal. She is as mischievous as a typical six-year-old, cooking cat food for dinner, for example, and setting her trailer on fire.  But her eyes reflect such wisdom that at times, in closeup, you might believe she is decades older. Her philosophy is as deep as the waters of The Bathtub, the isolated bayou community in which she lives with her quick-tempered, ailing father.

This movie grabs you as soon as Hushpuppy begins to narrate her impressions of the world, listening to the heartbeats of birds and other creatures she finds, looking with trepidation at the gathering clouds that portend survival beyond that which a hurricane will require. We see the squalor as well as the natural beauty of her world, meet a group of motley friends and neighbors (most played by non-actors recruited from the community), and experience moments of dreamlike emotion that are touching and awe-inspiring.

Letting her mind run on a flight of fancy, after a lesson from her caring and profane schoolteacher, Hushpuppy imagines the polar ice caps melting, unleashing fierce beasts called Aurochs (from images tattooed on her teacher’s thigh).

The Aurochs might represent Hushpuppy’s fears, and her belief that everyone is a small piece in a big universe; if even one of those pieces gets broken, everything goes wrong.  She knows that her daddy is broken, and thinks that she is the cause.  His unidentified malady (probably leukemia) cannot be cured with local folk remedies.  This unleashes the beasts’ fury on the world.

 The Aurochs are a terrific, fantastical achievement by the filmmakers. In spite of the low budget, the special effects are amazing, revealing the beasts’ savagery and even their tenderness.  We wait for an eventual confrontation; will Hushpuppy be overcome by the Beasts? Or will she face them? The outcome, which I won’t spoil, is breathtaking.

Hushpuppy’s relationship with her father is as unruly as the community around her.  Wink knows that life will be tough for his daughter.  

In the only way he knows how, he helps her to grow up fast: teaching her to catch fish bare-handed; helping her to survive a storm in a floating trunk that will lift her as the floods come: instructing her in the proper manner to eat crabs and crawfish; engaging in shouting matches and even physical confrontations; and ordering her never to cry.

The story blends realism with regional mythology, and as it nears its climax, it takes a turn into a dreamlike state. That risk pays off in a deeply emotional way.

Hushpuppy has heard Wink tell legendary stories about her mama, who "swam away" after Hushpuppy was born. Her mama was so beautiful that water boiled on the stove when she merely entered the kitchen.  She proved deadly with a shotgun on an intruding alligator one day, and fried it into something “juicy and delicious”.  Hushpuppy sometimes has imaginary talks with her mama, or calls out to her at a lighthouse beacon on the horizon.

In a sequence shot with amorphous beauty, Hushpuppy and some other young girls from The Bathbub escape a medical shelter, where they were sequestered after Katrina. They swim out to a fishing boat bound for a legendary floating tavern called Elysian Fields.  Hushpuppy believes that she might find her mama there.

The hostesses of Elysian Fields comfort the other girls and dance with them, in lovely images of maternal tenderness. Hushpuppy encounters a beautiful woman, cooking in the kitchen. She gives Hushpuppy some life lessons, and fries up a tasty treat that Hushpuppy brings to Wink, who is fading at the shelter.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" is the feature-film debut of director Benh Zeitlin, as well as the acting debuts of Wallis as Hushpuppy and Dwight Henry as Wink. This film is a true original in look, style, and story.

Ben Richardson’s cinematography, cutting-edge and off-the-cuff, captures the precise, poignant details that enrich each scene.  The music, co-written by Zeitlin and Dan Romer, soars with the right mix of heart and mystery.  The story, adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from her one-act play “Juicy and Delicious”, is thin on plot but rich with atmosphere and character. The narration alone elevates the movie from a beautiful, low-budget allegory into something more enduring.

The Bathtub is a community that is especially vulnerable to the ravages of a pandemic: extreme poverty, poor hygiene, insufficient diet, lack of education and medical care, few resources for news and community guidance.  In such a close-knit group that is always close together for drinking, eating crawfish, and celebrating with parades and fireworks, a fast-moving contagion could wipe out their whole community.

We hear that life will forever change after this pandemic.  It's an easy thing to say, and easier to adjust to  from a place of comfort; but for some communities and many individuals, the changes could be impossible to overcome.  True as they might be, the glib pronouncements about life changing forever do little to give hope to those people.

Worst of all, there is no technology in a place like The Bathtub. There are no virtual chats, no virtual parties, no virtual doctor visits, no virtual anything.  We hear through the media that we’re all in it together.  So true.  But the phrase is becoming a cliché, like “Have a Nice Day.” Residents in The Bathtub truly WOULD be in this together, but not with everyone else.

There are many other communities and individuals that, due to poverty, culture or location, have no way to connect via internet, to feel like they are not alone  during this crisis: the elderly, the impoverished, the geographically isolated, to name a few. There must be a better way to reach out, to let them know that they, too, are in this together with everyone else, a way to provide encouragement and guidance on how to ride it out safely.

This virus is a beast, and would be especially so for Hushpuppy and the Bathtub. We may not hear much about the people on culture's fringes,  like those depicted in "Beasts of the Southern Wild", nor appreciate their way of life.  But they, too, must have their visionaries, like Hushpuppy.  They also deserve a chance to survive, as they subdue the Aurochs of Covid-19.