film studies

This Malick-inspired response to Hurricane Katrina, about a six-year-old bayou-dweller and her father, has ambition and poetry to burn

Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature is part film, part hallucination: a ripe and gamey piece of what you might call Apocalyptic Southern Gothic, ambitious and flawed but sprinting with energy. It’s set at the time of the Katrina catastrophe – though it could as well be happening hundreds of years in the future, when much-prophesied climate calamities have come to pass. At other times it looks like some sort of modern-dress re-enactment of the distant biblical flood.

The setting is a fictional bayou territory, partly modelled on the real Isle de Jean Charles in southern Louisiana, the kind of place where, in another, more heartless type of movie, yuppies might ask for directions or gasoline from sinister locals inscrutably playing a mean banjo on their crumbling porch. This place is an eerily beautiful wetland called The Bathtub, because of the semi-permanent flood risk. It exists below the levee wall, indicating not merely that risk, but some suspension of the rules. The Bathtub is off the grid, a place where state or federal government is remote.

When Katrina hits, the rising waters are not so much a destruction, more an intensification of the already existing chaos. A hard-drinking guy called Wink (Dwight Henry) lives in a collapsing shack with his six-year-old daughter called Hushpuppy, superbly played by newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis. They are black; they have neighbours who are both black and white, and absolute, semi-feral poverty has rendered racial distinctions irrelevant. Wink is suffering from some kind of blood disorder and perhaps, in a more sentimental sense, the broken heart caused by the absence of Hushpuppy’s mother. This was a woman who according to family legend was so pretty she could light the gas stove just by walking past it. There is a scary moment when Hushpuppy, boiling with unresolved and unacknowledged anger, actually punches her dad right in the heart, with awful consequences.

The encroaching crisis brings Wink and Hushpuppy closer together. Wink tries to ferry his little girl and some other hardy souls to safety, and Zeitlin makes it look weirdly like the upriver journey in Apocalypse Now. It resembles a war zone, and the sudden surreal appearance of an old-fashioned looking bordello makes it look even more like Coppola’s Vietnam adventure. Survival is now the key, but Wink and Hushpuppy realise that this is only possible if the waters can be induced to fall by some desperate guerrilla measure – waters that are being kept high by the levee wall that is keeping the folks on the other side dry.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11. After Katrina, the television public in the US were astonished to see news coverage that looked like a charity appeal for a very poor country. But nobody in this film wants your charity. What’s interesting is its defiant, libertarian streak. Wink tours around his rackety neighbourhood as the storm hits, dismayed at everyone getting ready to cut and run. “They’re afraid of the water like a buncha babies!” he says, scornfully. Later, when the disaster has arrived, it is Wink who rallies his comrades: “This ain’t no time to sit around cryin’ like a buncha pussies!” Repeatedly, he encourages his daughter to show off by flexing her sparrow-sized upper-arm muscles, like a heartbreakingly tiny bodybuilder. “Show me them guns!” he yells.

Wink and Hushpuppy don’t need official help. The thought of being herded into a sports arena, deprived of their self-respect, is depressing. When they do, temporarily, find themselves in a clinic, the safety and order simply dispirits Hushpuppy, who says it looks like an empty fish tank – a remark that reminded me of the title of Andrea Arnold’s British social realist film.

Beasts of the Southern Wild looks of course very like the work of Terrence Malick, which is both its inspiration and its flaw. The spaces and silences of the landscape echo Malick’s earlier movies, though the visuals are rougher and meaner here. But the humans are not the only beasts of this southern wild. Surely inspired by the bizarre dinosaur of Malick’s last-but-one film, The Tree of Life, Hushpuppy is beginning to see colossal porcine creatures looming out of the swamp. These beasts are a striking and startling invention, but self-conscious in a way that Malick’s dinosaur was not, because they are perhaps too obviously born of Hushpuppy’s own unhappiness. There is something a little sentimental here – though Wallis looks as vulnerable as Fay Wray with King Kong. Benh Zeitlin’s ambition and verve, nevertheless, are really exhilarating.

Cut off from the mainland, surrounded by rising waters, the Bathtub is a desolate wilderness of poverty where a small community struggles to survive. Hushpuppy considers it "the prettiest place on Earth." She is a fierce and unbreakable 6-year-old girl who lives here with her father, Wink, and other survivors who live so close to the earth that it might as well be part of them.

In the opening moments of "Beasts of the Southern Wild," I had no idea when or where we were. Only gradually did I understand that the Bathtub is offshore from New Orleans, isolated by levees, existing self-contained on its own terms. The distant profiles of drilling rigs and oil refineries might as well be mysterious prehistoric artifacts.

A fearsome storm is said to be on the way, but existence here is already post-apocalyptic, with the people cobbling together discarded items of civilization like the truck bed and oil drums that have been made into a boat. Their ramshackle houses perch uneasily on bits of high ground, and some are rebuilding them into arks that they hope will float through the flood.

Hushpuppy is on intimate terms with the natural world, with the pigs she feeds and the fish she captures with her bare hands; sometimes she believes animals speak to her in codes.

This is only an illustration of the way all small children think, translating the mysteries of an unfolding world into their own terms. But Hushpuppy lives in desolation, and her inner resources are miraculous. She is so focused, so sure, so defiant and brave, that she is like a new generation put forward in desperate times by the human race. She is played by a force of nature named Quvenzhané Wallis, who was 5 years old when the movie was cast, 7 when it was finished, and like many of the cast members had never acted before. She is so uniquely and particularly herself that I wonder if the movie would have been possible without her.

"Beasts" is a first feature by Benh Zeitlin, based on a screenplay and stage play by his collaborator, Lucy Alibar. They found post-Katrina locations in the ravaged bayous of Louisiana, and constructed on a small budget their convincing and meticulously detailed settlement. Everyone in the Bathtub knows one another, and in a sense, they're all the same age — which is Now. It is a daily struggle, helped for some by alcohol, and they recite their communal myths of liberated ice age creatures that will come foraging for them as the glaciers melt.

Hushpuppy and Wink are close, and her father does all he can to teach her survival skills. That doesn't stop him from giving her a whack alongside the head when she carelessly starts a fire. We understand how literally her mind deals with the world when she tries to hide from the fire inside a cardboard box — as if she will be safe if the flames can't see her. Wink tells his daughter that her mother "swam away" one day. Hushpuppy expects her to return and sometimes calls out to her with a piercing scream.

You can make "Beasts of the Southern Wild" into an allegory of anything you want. It is far too detailed and specific to fit easily into general terms. The Bathtub is this place in this time, and how can it "stand for" anything else? This film is a remarkable creation, imagining a self-reliant community without the safety nets of the industrialized world. Someday they will run out of gasoline for their outboard motors, and then they will do — well, whatever people did before they needed gasoline.

I met Dwight Henry, who plays Wink. He owns his own pastry shop, and the casting people had to visit him in the middle of the night because he bakes all night. He said he's not interested in an acting career. His life is centered on his wife and five children. They are his bedrock, and that is the conviction he brings to the role of Hushpuppy's daddy. This movie is a fantasy in many ways, but the authenticity and directness of the untrained actors make it effortlessly convincing.

Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is one of the year's best films.