Critical Response to Beasts of the Southern Wild – Evaluation
Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the tale of a child and her father surviving in their little world. They live completely cut off from the developed world; using medicine from herbs, fashioning boats from the back-ends of pick-up trucks and living in raised trailers as houses. The film has many themes present, them being one with nature and living from its resources as much as possible. It also has the theme of respecting nature and that humans can try as much as they want but they will never be able to thwart the raw power that is Mother Nature. From a literary sense the movie shows themes and events well, but cinematically it can be seen to be as much of a mess as Hushpuppy lives in.
The opening of the film starts strong showing the audience who the characters are, what the world this story is taking place in, and the relationship between the two main characters, Hushpuppy and her father. As good as the movie starts, it quickly loses its strengths in the meat of the film. The characters go from one location to the next and from one scene to another never really explaining what is happening. Hushpuppy lives with her father, but it wasn’t clear that she had her own house until later. We here the story of the primitive animal that ravaged cavemen and then we see what one would assume is one of these animals frozen in icecaps that are melting. The animals’ relevance to the story is never mentioned again until the main characters encounter them in the last 10 minutes of the film. Having the animals there for symbolism is fine but they play no integral part to the plot at all. They can easily be removed from the film and nothing would really change. There are a lot of things that happen that have no importance: Hushpuppy burning down her house, the Hushpuppy saving the medicine that the teacher gave her, all the other secondary characters themselves. The only characters that have any importance in the story are Hushpuppy and her father, any other character can be swapped for anything else.
Secondary roles are there to either help the main character develop or add to the story and themes within the film. There is no other secondary plot other than the primitive animals making their way from Antarctica to the bayou in 3 or 4 days, which itself is impossible and has no explanation. When characters are not memorable and end up being a waste of screen time, this creates friction within the story-telling. “Why are these characters here? What are they doing? Where did this person come from?” All questions that can describe what watching this film is like. After Hushpuppy burns down her house and gets into a fight with her father, she hits him in the chest, and he collapses which shows us he has a weak heart and he is sick. In this instance, it totally seemed like the father died; leaving Hushpuppy alone right after she said she wished he were dead. This would have been a much more turn of events but when Hushpuppy returns with medicine to fix her mistake, her father is magically gone. After some time, he’s back, in hospital scrubs. How did he get back? How did he leave? Was he able to somehow get up and walk to the hospital after having a heart attack by having a little girl punch his chest? We’ll never know. It’s one thing to leave something to the audience’s imagination, but this made no narrative sense.
The cinematography is also incredibly poor. Characters will be standing totally still as the camera has a light seizure. Constantly shaking and bouncing around while the audience tries to focus on what is happening with the calm conversation. Cinematography plays a huge role in film, often making the difference between masterpieces, and whatever this movie is. It removes the audience from the immersion and thus the story. The movie has good themes and a classic story of Mentor teaching the Student for when the Student is alone but this is a very weak depiction of it. This kind of plot is much better executed in the film The Road and the TV show The Walking Dead. Beasts of the Southern Wild leaves the audience with more questions than answers, wanting more but in the wrong way and simply fumbling for whatever story they can find.
Adam Leal 