86% Beasts of the Southern Wild

I was shocked at how bad "Beasts of the Southern Wild" was. Based on the trailer, which was glorious, I thought this would be my no.1 film of 2012. Not so. First-time filmmaker Benh Zeitlin certainly is talented, and he is a true artist. But here's the problem: he had ideas in his head for three or four different films. Instead of separating out the ideas and writing four different screenplays, he jumbled all the projects together into one profoundly confused gumbo. Each time I thought I was grasping a meaningful work of art in "Beasts," another work of art would erupt, going in a completely different direction and leaving the previous one half-baked. The collision of a half-dozen allegorical tracks made the film for me a muddled mess. I hope someone sits Zeitlin down and teaches him to edit himself. If he learns this, he might turn into a major new filmmaker. The storyline focuses on a girl around 6 years old in the New Orleans area who's being raised in a wilderness area by her father. The girl's mother abandoned the family. She's wrestling with feelings of abandonment and trying to survive in an environment of chaos. Her father disappears occasionally and seems to be having serious health problems. There are fearsome ecological problems as well. Tropical storms periodically flood her low-lying area (which is referred to as The Bathtub) so completely, that she, her father, and their neighbors have to spend considerable amounts of time floating on rafts waiting for the waters to recede. Their whole world is drowned periodically. But they remain fiercely devoted to The Bathtub area and refuse to join civilization. Given their vulnerability to floods, global warming provides an added dimension of anxiety. To make sure we get this, Zeitlin occasionally cuts to footage of actual glaciers breaking apart. Initially I thought "Beasts" was going to be a unique meditation on global warming. A children's song for a world about to drown, if you will, with heart-wrenching references to Hurricane Katrina giving it added specificity and punch. If it had been this, I think "Beasts" might have been an elegiac masterpiece. The problem is that so many other things kept getting in the way. To list just some examples: From out of nowhere, the denizens of the Bathtub are suddenly rounded up and taken to a government-run facility. That thread is suddenly dropped when the girl and several other children (inexplicably) escape the facility. The children then mysteriously are transplanted to an off-shore oil rig that also functions as a brothel, where the girl has a surreal interaction with a figure who appears to represent her mother. That thread is also suddenly dropped, and we're back at the Bathtub where the girl is facing down giant beasts that look like warthogs -- beasts that have nothing to do with the rest of the story. They seem to wander in from another film. When the warthogs appeared, I mentally checked out. I was so exhausted trying to keep track of the narrative threads, when it hit me: this isn't one film, it's an assemblage of fragments from a director working on four different films at the same time. When the filmmaker figures out which film he wants to show me, I'll be back to watch it. Until then, I'm outta here.

July 15, 2012

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/beasts_of_the_southern_wild/

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