Movie Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild tore up the festival circuit in early 2012 and went on to be an arthouse hit when it was released nationwide in June. Last month, the film surprised everyone in the film community by picking 4 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director. With all these accolades, I figured I'd give Beasts of the Southern Wild a shot. To my surprise, this film not only failed to live up to the hype, it's the worst film I've seen from 2012.

Beasts of the Southern Wild reminded me a lot of last year's The Tree of Life. The story is incoherent and abstract with only a few events occurring over the course of the film and the rest of it being pointless filler with the occasional "what the fuck?" moment to save the viewer from falling asleep This film is an obvious metaphor for post-Katrina New Orleans with a fantasy/dystopian background substituting for the damage the hurricane left behind. What could have been a truly beautiful story about a 9-year old girl trying to find her long-lost mother after her father falls ill after a devastating storm wipes out her bayou community is instead an orgy of pretentiousness and nonsense aimed at the film snob crowd. Co-writer/director Benh Zeitlin seems more focused on doing his best Terrence Malick impression with a hodgepodge of random events that serve as a feeble attempt at a story and plenty of self-indulgent camerawork then giving us well-developed characters or even an actual story. A majority of this film is just 9-year old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wells) being yelled at by her father (Dwight Henry) for no reason at all. How a film which is mostly comprised of just poorly-shot yelling until the last 15 minutes is hailed as a masterpiece and a truly moving film is beyond me. What saves this film from being one of the worst I've ever seen is the actors. They try their best to work with the wildly underdeveloped material they are given, but they can't really do much of anything to take this terrible script out of the gutter.  To me, this was a film with no context or real reason to exist. This is essentially a tripped-out fantasy version of the hardships and poverty that occurred after Hurricane Katrina and it just doesn't work in the slightest. Beasts of the Southern Wild is nothing but pretentious indie garbage and I can't fathom how it picked up so much acclaim.

1/5 Stars