I recently saw Beasts of the Southern Wild, which reminded me very strongly of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which you can take as a good or bad thing. Tree of Life divided me...some parts of it were gorgeous, and some of it was ridiculously pretentious. You would get these unbelievably beautiful shots of hands framing infant feet and then you'd be interrupted by a cg montage of volcanoes or dinosaurs. There was good acting in there, but it was overshadowed by the more fantastical elements of its (almost nonexistent) plot. Incidentally, Tree of Life is the only movie I've been to in the theaters that had people consistently walk out of it.
I really wasn't kidding about the dinosaurs.
Beasts of the Southern Wild was similarly wondrous in so many ways. It mostly resisted pretension by being narrated by the young protagonist, Hushpuppy (played by Quvenzhane Wallis). Hushpuppy represents the best parts of the movie -- how she teeters the line between naivete and a wisdom that goes deep into your bones. Hushpuppy is at turns innocent, yearning, fierce, and incredibly unapologetically wild. The most bizarre scene in this movie is not the cg-created Audubons that roam the land, but rather that one scene we get of a tamed Hushpuppy shoved into a dress with her hair tugged into neat braids.
When I walked out of this movie, I didn't know how to feel about it. And I still didn't know when I sat down to write this post. I meant only to mention the movie in passing, but found I had a lot more to say about it. There's something about it that sticks with you and makes you mull over it. The same goes for all of the deeply flawed characters. As much as you might want to lay judgment on Hushpuppy's father, you can't. Not completely. There's something of a Greek tragedy in here -- not just because Hushpuppy makes an odyssey into the land of the dead -- but also in Cassandraic way of how the characters foretell the doom that will inevitably swallow them and yet they rail against their fate.
I say characters, but that's the wrong description. You can't say any of these are actors because you get more of a feeling that this is a fantastical story being lived out. At no point do you ever think of this being a created movie or that people are reading lines from a script. This is helped by both the unknown actors and the nebulousness of the setting.
The movie doesn't quite make sense, but most of the artistic indulgences can be overlooked because of the relatively short running time of the movie. However, its biggest flaw is the dependency on hand-held camera action. I nearly threw up in the middle of the movie and had to stop watching quite a few times. I only kept going because I knew how short the movie was. I know the supposed strength of a hand-held camera is that it is supposed to foster a sense of intimacy and immediacy in the scene. But in truth, it usually tends to distract and distance the viewer, especially if it's used for extended periods of time. And for those that are sensitive to it (like me), it causes a rather unforgiving nausea. This is the reason I dock points from this movie. You may call my judgment impaired (and it probably is), but since the impairment was caused by how the movie was directed, I think that's fair.
Finally, but not least, the music for this movie was one of the wondrous aspects of it.
The movie doesn't quite make sense, but most of the artistic indulgences can be overlooked because of the relatively short running time of the movie. However, its biggest flaw is the dependency on hand-held camera action. I nearly threw up in the middle of the movie and had to stop watching quite a few times. I only kept going because I knew how short the movie was. I know the supposed strength of a hand-held camera is that it is supposed to foster a sense of intimacy and immediacy in the scene. But in truth, it usually tends to distract and distance the viewer, especially if it's used for extended periods of time. And for those that are sensitive to it (like me), it causes a rather unforgiving nausea. This is the reason I dock points from this movie. You may call my judgment impaired (and it probably is), but since the impairment was caused by how the movie was directed, I think that's fair.
Finally, but not least, the music for this movie was one of the wondrous aspects of it.
