3/5 stars

After Katrina, New Orleans was changed irrevocably.  The city’s ninth ward became synonymous with destruction and government ineffectualness.  Residents of the Louisiana city were forced to migrate across the country, acting as refugees in their own land.  It was a display of how disruptive an impact natural disasters have on our society, and how recovery, both financial and moral, is still in progress. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a spectacular response.

Colours dance fantastically across the screen accompanied by the undeniably precocious and empowered acting of its star, Miss Quvenzhane Wallis, who plays Hushpuppy.  She and her father, Lowell Landes, seek to get back the life they had before the storm.  This is where the film complicates itself, never undoing its own riddle.  The spontaneous energy of their moments together is harrowing; the viewer may well be caught up in its raw, uncontainable display of imagination.  We are trapped in Hushpuppy’s perspective, one that is navigating her identity as a young daughter, a member of Bathtub (the town they are from), and a soul who believes they are much larger than the immediate world around them.  One could simply stop there and begin to praise the film’s Beckettian desperateness.  Not so fast.

The score that accompanies the film is composed by director Benh Zeitlin.  It is celebratory even when things look their darkest, a testament to the spirit governing the film; ecstasy in the face of mayhem. But oh to be a graver, more realistic film.  There is no doubt that a representation of Katrina victims as less spiritually inspired would have been a draining experience, or simply nullified by the jubilant refrain of a jazz funeral.  But who has a grip on the reality of citizens like the ones inhabiting Bathtub?  I wish the film challenged us more by diversity of accounts, not it’s lyric.

Lenhardt Stevens