Taking top prizes at both Sundance and Cannes, Benh Zeitlin’s first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, arrives on a tsunami of praise, with backlash aftershocks immediately following. It’s a gorgeous thing, set in an impoverished Southern area called the Bathtub that pointedly resembles rural Louisiana. (The film was shot in South Terrebone Parish.) It’s there that a spirited 6-year-old named Hushpuppy (the astonishing Quvenzhané Wallis) makes her home in a tree-bound trailer, connected by zip line to one occupied by her alcoholic father (Dwight Henry). Captured on Super 16mm, the film’s images are warm and earthy, the colors rich and saturated, as if the print had been dug up from a particularly loamy patch of ground. But the beauty is troubling — not simply because it runs the risk of aestheticizing rural poverty, but because Zeitlin and his collaborators seem heedless of the possibility. Intermingling myth with recent history, Beasts visits devastation on the Bathtub in the form of giant, world-crushing animals who charge endlessly through miniature cities, their approach chronicled in blurry cutaways that flaunt an aesthetic at once handmade and supernatural. Zeitlin, who co-wrote the script with playwright Lucy Alibar, is the son of folklorists, and Beasts has some of the meta-mythological tone of Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction, but it’s also infused with a troubling sense of privilege that’s difficult to shake. Many of the film’s champions offer little more than ardent cooing, bristling at “cynical” criticisms as if it were a baby chick in need of sheltering. For all the wondrous gravity of Wallis’ performance, it’s hard not to cringe at Hushpuppy’s faux-naif voiceover — “We is who the earth is for” — which mimics the worst of Terrence Malick’s excesses without his poetic rigor. Beasts is a movie eminently worth seeing, but surrendering to its spell is as dangerous as trusting in government-built levees.
