Beasts of the Southern Wild

A Beautiful Elegy to a World That is Dying
I am a coonass. I am from Southwest Louisiana and am a part of the joie de vivre culture of South Louisiana. This world has embraced me and rolled up in its cocoon of love of place, of family, of celebration all my life. Beasts of the Southern Wild comes the closest of any movie I have ever seen to expressing the truth of the sheer beauty of life in the swamps. Through the devastation of hurricanes, the opression of the wealthy, and the well-meaning of outsiders, we survive. And yet our world is dying. We know it as surely as we can see the trees dying on the marshes as the salt water moves further inland, because our buffers are dissappearing. We know it when we drive the roads and watch the waves lap against our tires or roar against the sides of our cars. We know it when we fish and see the open water where once there was land.

This movie, better than any other, cherishes these truths and films them. I'm grateful that Zeitlan chose not to embrace Cajuns in this...

Everything you hope for in a film
A good film is a confluence of many variables. A good director orchestrates these variables into a finished form. Beasts of the Southern Wild is such a film and Behn Zeitlin is such a director. And the brilliance of Zeitlin is that he manages to take all manner of seemingly contradictory elements and make them,as a nameless boat captain says in the film, cohesive.

One such variable is story. Hushpuppy is a six-year-old girl who lives with her father on the wrong side of a levee in a fictitious Southeast Louisiana town called The Bathtub. The film follows her point of view, and the world of her active imagination and the real world around her often intertwine on screen. The film is your standard coming of age story, but it is this unique perspective of Hushpuppy and her understanding of the world around her that is the foundation of the film and its magic.

Another variable is music. The director worked closely with his friend and composer Dan Romer in creating the...

Like 'Whale Rider', a Powerful Performance from a Child in a Great Film
BOTSW is easily the best movie of 2012 so far (although I loved 'Moonrise Kingdom' too), and the stars should get ready for Oscar season. The pacing may be off-putting to some, but if you can handle artsy fare, you're sure to love it. The story tells the tale of eight year old Hushpuppy, who must save her father, friends, and herself from mysterious beasts in what may or may not be the end of the world. The lines between fantasy and reality are very blurry, which makes this movie a great discussion piece for a group. One thing I will note is that while everything about this movie is exceptional, the score is one of the best I've heard in a long time. I went to a screening with the film's director and two stars, and they spoke to how organic the entire film process was, and how elements in the script were rewritten for each of the leads so the dialogue would sound authentic to the deep south. Every detail is watched carefully, and this is truly a must-see.

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