I can’t tell you about this movie without telling you about my father.
My father liked to pop out his false teeth while laughing to increase the fun. He laughed a lot. He used to sing me Rod Stewart songs and impersonate Elvis. He was Southern, black, and an alcoholic. He could be rageful, and when he was rageful, he could be violent.
When I saw Dwight Henry’s Wink casually pull a raw chicken out of a cooler with a fire poker and drop it onto a make-shift grill in his first appearance as Hushpuppy’s father in Beasts of the Southern Wild, I felt like I recognized him. My false-teeth father once built a grill from found stones in my backyard. When I saw Beast’s Wink begin to drink and rage, I recognized that too.
Maybe you were hoping this review would start off with the scoop on prodigious newcomer to the screen, Quevenzhané Wallis, who plays 4-year-old Hushpuppy. Maybe you were hoping for the “it could happen to me” feeling we all get when we read about people walking off the street and into serious critical accolades. Right now, maybe you’re thinking what I was thinking for the duration of director Benh Zeitlin’s first feature-length film – This is not what I expected.
What I expected was something, as my friend Jewels put it, “Like Where the Wild Things Are, but in the south, with black people.” I thought the film would be about a rag-tag group of children riding wild beasts and building rafts and facing unimaginably terrifying, horrifying obstacles. The kind of obstacles that fail to terrify and horrify us because they are so fantastic that we know they are not real.
But Beasts of the Southern Wild gets really real, really quick. The opening scene is an aerial view of Bathtub, the fictional Louisiana settlement where Beasts takes place. Mossy rippling water stretches wide, held back by a levee on one side. Out in the middle of all that water, there is Bathtub: lush with greenery, lush with the ingenuity of hand-build boats and homes, and lush with the magic that keeps it above water. Simultaneously, we hear the voice of four-year-old Hushpuppy: “They built the wall that cuts us off. They think we gon drown down here. Be we aint goin nowhere.”
Right then, you know that the ghosts of Katrina are going to be with you for the whole rest of the film. Right then, you start thinking about all those children who really did drown.
Hushpuppy continues to introduce us to her life and the town of Bathtub. She lives in her own trailer, raised up on barrels and smudged with silt were water has risen and retreated. A few hundred feet away her father lives in a stilted wooden one-room structure with an open front. When that raw chicken I told you about gets juicy and golden he rings a bell for “feed up time”, and Hushpuppy comes running along with all the animals in their care for a family meal.
Then Hushpuppy tells us about the universe, how there is a certain way it fits together and how if something gets broken or falls out of place the whole thing will fall apart, and we see images of icebergs crashing into the ocean. (A reference to global warming and the theory that it is in part to blame for Katrina?) Then she tells us about how she can understand what birds say, and we see her holding a small bird to her ear like a cellphone, listening.
This is the moment you realize the film is going to be beautiful, even if it is terrifying, and full of real ghosts. Every color in the film seems to come from nature. A re-purposed plastic milk jug is yellowed to the color of the grubs Hushpuppy finds wriggling on the underside of a leaf, the faded blue of the truck bed Wink has turned into a boat looks as if it were painted with a brush dipped in the wide Louisiana sky.
But then, Wink disappears. Hushpuppy is left on her own, and eats cat food to survive while she waits for Wink to return. I think of the families struggling to feed themselves in the food deserts of Oakland, where I live. It’s too real. But this is also the point in the film where the tension between reality and fantasy begins to pull apart the narrative. The people of Bathtub ask if Hushpuppy is doing all right, but Hushpuppy pushes them off and they leave her alone. For a dark fantastic story of a child-hero, this is appropriate. But real talk: people in broke communities take care of each other, especially southern ones. That child would not have been eating cat food, no matter how independent she was. They would have had her eating chicken and thinking it was her own idea.
After an undefined protracted period, (a few days? a fortnight?) Wink returns, appearing as quickly as he disappeared, in a hospital gown, disoriented and angry. He screams at Hushpuppy and hits her. We see him drinking a lot from this point on in a way that suggests it is not a new habit since returning from the hospital. And here’s where my heart tanked with disappointment. Besides fantastic beast-riding, the other thing I’d been expecting from the film was a positive father-daughter relationship. A vanguard non-violent image of a black father. And yet, here we go again with the Angry Violent Black Daddy.
Of course there is such a thing as the Angry Violent Black Daddy outside of stereotype. I know, I had one. And it isn’t that Zeitlin leaves Wink’s character flat – there are many moments of tenderness between Hushpuppy and Wink throughout the film. It’s just that, a white man writing and directing an AVBD makes me uncomfortable. It gives me the queasy-uneasy all in my belly. From Birth of a Nation up to the present moment, white filmmakers have been presenting black people and blackness in ways that reify and justify oppression of black people and all others. A white man envisioning and directing a grown and muscular dark-skinned black man beating on and screaming at a little girl makes me uncomfortable; I’m not afraid to say I think it ought to make you uncomfortable too.
I tried to build my own levee against the memories of my tender/angry father and sterotype panic, but the combination broke me open. I started crying, and didn’t stop for the rest of the film. I find it embarrassing to cry in public, and was secretly thankful that others were even more undone than I was. No one noticed my stoic trickles with all the sniffling and open-mouth gasping that was going on in that theater.
Things got better and worse when Hushpuppy’s deceased mother was introduced through a flashback. She is naked save her white panties, which are splattered in blood as she has just finished shooting a gator. On the “better” end, my first reaction to this image was, “HELL YEAH! There is nothing more bad-ass than killing a gator with your tits out. That’s the kind of lady I’d like to roll with.”
But for the worse, I began to think about the historical and contemporary sexualization of black women’s bodies. I can’t honestly find any reason why this instance of a white guy giving us a black mother character who is defined from minute one by her sexuality is somehow OK.
Zeitlin says his motivation for this film was to show “how through a culture that’s joyous and celebratory and fierce, you can really defy death.” I believe him. In interviews he talks about the film in the loving, obsessed way of a new parent. Talking with The Hollywood Reporter, he had this to say about making Beasts:
….You have to then sort of find this spontaneity in the performance of the actual crew who’s up against a lot of the same elements that the characters are up against and it becomes almost like an athletic performance that the actual crew does in order to capture the film. And so I think that what that gains is you know, instead of this very delicate, perfect thing that ends up on screen, it ends up having all this muscle in it, you know? It has all this wet in it, and it has all these mosquito bites on it, and it’s almost like a painting that’s got a ton of paint chunks on it and texture to it and it just has a different kind of quality that tastes different, you know it’s not — it’s not like the same meal that you have a whole bunch of times. It’s made differently and there’s a flavor to it that you only get with spontaneity.
I am a true admirer of Zeitlin’s vision and artistry in Beasts. Immediately upon exiting the theater, all I could say was that the film “gave me a lot of feelings,” which I think is a testament to the complexity and beauty of his storytelling. It the representations had been all negative, I would have left the theater angry. If they had been all sentimental, I’d have left feeling only manipulated. Instead, I was thoughtful, confused, and most of all affected. After letting the film settle in my mind a bit, I see Zeitlin as a sort of Steinbeck: a man who has told a beautiful story about a people he has great admiration and compassion for, but who’s outsider status ultimately defeats his good intentions in critical ways.
Please read carefully: I am not implying that people are not allowed to tell stories about communities they are not from, full stop. What I am saying is that it’s possible to have great intentions, make a beautiful film, and still be interacting problematically with trope and stereotype. And I’m saying that no matter how beautiful and necessary the film is – and this one is – it doesn’t make up for the fact that oppressed people rarely get to tell their own stories, even in independent film.
As for my expectations, I am both glad and disappointed that they were toppled. As I said, I was expecting better than the old angry-man/whore-woman dichotomy, and that was disheartening. But in the case of my expectations of fanciful not-real horror, it is to Zeitlin’s credit that I did not get them fulfilled. Katrina is no biblical flood story that can be put on as a church pageant.
In the end, I find myself wondering how this film is playing in the 9th ward. I may have a deep sense of political solidarity with that community, but I don’t have any blood ties or personal relationship to it and I wish I could hear their myriad voices in response to this.
I do know what my father would have thought. If he were still alive, and I were still a child, he would have picked up Wink’s “You the Man!” parenting tag-line and used it to beef up my confidence. He would have played Beasts of the Southern Wild with me, pretending to be a prehistoric buffalo-pig while I rode on his back, fighting the terrifying, horrifying obstacles that came my way.
14 responses
I wanted to see this movie based on the reviews, but now? I have no interest, I might get it on NetFlix one day.
It comes down to this line here: “a man who has told a beautiful story about a people he has great admiration and compassion for, but who’s outsider status ultimately defeats his good intentions in critical ways.”
I think it comes down to caring about your subjects, but presuming you already know their story.
This sort of thing really bugs me because I’ve encountered it throughout my life, someone who isn’t racist or hateful, but has created this narrative of your life in their heads instead of just taking the time to get to know you.
Practically every Black person has had a conversation where they corrected someone’s misconception about their life, only to have the person say: “But I thought that…”
Heard it all the time in college.
The portrayal of the parents was grating, not sure I’d want to see it.
I’m not from the South, but I’d imagine people put on clothes before going outside to shoot Alligators, call me crazy.
Yes Angry Black Drunk Daddy’s exist, but that’s hardly the default setting for Black families and it’s so prevalent in Hollywood that portraying it again is arguably artistically lazy. I almost wonder if the director spent that much time gathering information about that world to craft his story, or if he just had a story and then looked for data that validated it.
I also wonder if the movie is worse than it appears, but manages to punch above its weight via beautiful storytelling even if the story is heavily flawed.
I still kind of want to see this, but I doubt I’d be able to see past the flaws.
The sad part is that there are so few of “our” stories being told, Tyler Perry? GOD NO. Spike Lee? Meh….
Then that leaves……
……ugh.
I believe Ms. Love about her disappointment – but the only thing is that Henry, the actor playing Wink, wrote much of his own dialogue, according to him in an interview I read (I’ll have to look it up again – I don’t have citation), which complicates the matters of authorship and identity that Love brings up. Henry says in an interview that he told the director/writer what he would be doing and saying if he were dying to prepare his own daughters for the harsh job of raising themselves if he were to be dying very suddenly and if they’d be on their own. What I thought this meant was that he, and the Hushpuppy character should have been given writers’ credit, which I didn’t see in the credits, but I’m not exactly sure how it works with improv-writing style screenplays – Zeitlin does say that Henry told him when Zeitlin had written something stupid, and Zeitlin threw it out and started over. I personally loved the child’s fantasy of the whore mother and all the little children of drunks slowdancing with faces between their breasts. I thought it was perfectly perfectly perfectly childlike-queer – and as a story of complex gender, this made sense to me and it resonated for me – in fantasizing the perfect sexy, independent, sweet, and self-absorbed mom to understand why she left me but still wasn’t “bad” in Hushpuppy’s eyes. As a white person from the West Coast growing up in poverty with alcoholics and addicts around, the idea that I would hide my need from others (especially other alcoholic adults) seems really reasonable and self-protective, but I did think it rang untrue when Hushpuppy didn’t tell her teacher, in this community, she was hungry. I believed she had self-preservation pride, and needed to make sure not to look weak, but I didn’t believe that she would think she looked weak to her teacher for being hungry – I did think it rang true that she didn’t tell her teacher that her dad was missing. The movie to me is so very good because it does theatricalize in the same space the emotional, fantastical, and practical experiences of growing up with alcohol and violence and poverty set alongside real community and love. It is not an easy film at all. If somebody told me it was Where The Wild Things Are with black people, I would become pretty upset. This is a movie about the end of the world, and for so many children in poverty and alcoholism the world ends over and over again – and at the same time, even as spirit is crushed, spirit also remains. Even as toughness is encouraged, some tenderness hangs out until it’s safe (if ever) to come back out And imagination – even, or perhaps especially in trauma – fires brightly. This is not a happy tale. This is a tale of trauma and battle. And it shows the hilarity, fierceness, forgiveness, imagination, and powerlessness of people trying to be free when the world is a shithole and it often hurts to be human. If this movie had not included the violence, it would have been a cute fantasy. It’s not a cute fantasy, but it is a deep and beautiful one.
I used to live in South Carolina, which is where Zeitlin’s mother grew up. As it happens, I now live in Oakland. What’s considered black culture here in the North is just THE culture in the South. The only difference between a poor, shirtless, angry, manic depressive black daddy or white daddy in the South is skin. They eat the same food, they talk the same way, they go to churches with the same doctrine.
There’s a lot of bigotry and racism in South Carolina, on both sides, but the demographic breakdown is about 50/50. You can harbor racist sentiments in South Carolina, but you you’ve got to do it on intimate terms. If you go to a park in downtown Columbia, you’ll see more casual, friendly black/white interaction than you’d ever see at a park in Oakland. You simply can’t avoid contact the way people do out here.
Though I don’t know it, I’m going to guess Zeitlin has seen enough of South Carolina firsthand to know what Southern culture looks like. I’ll bet he’s got cousins that talk and behave almost exactly like the people in this movie. They might have white skin, but they’d eat hushpuppies and boiled peanuts and collard greens and go to church on Sunday, and scream in the street and beat their kids and laugh with them later, just like millions of other black or white Southerners.
Zeitlin’s parents are both anthropologists who’ve been documenting urban folkways in housing projects around New York for 30 years, so he’s probably hip to the nuances of this razor edge subject.
My two cents.
Hi Anna Joy –
I wanted to respond to your comments because the gender/queerness narrative in the film is something I really wanted to talk about but space did not allow. I agree that there are many “perfectly perfectly perfectly childlike-queer” moments and really appreciated this about the film.
But I couldn’t decide how I ultimately felt about the portrayal of the sex workers, and the correlation between the woman Hushpuppy meets there and her deceased mother. On the one hand, why shouldn’t sex workers be part of this magical narrative? On the other, I’m tired of the over-representation in the media of sex work as a profession for black women (or maybe I’ve just seen too many episodes of Law and Order?). And again, history makes me uneasy about Zeitlin taking responsibility for that story too.
For me, Wink and Hushpuppy writing their own dialogue doesn’t take Zeitlin off the hook for the portrayal – he’s still the director – though it does put Henry on it. The commenter below you, Sonja, mentions that Zeitlin’s parents are cultural anthropologists, which for me, makes him more suspicous, not less.
And I’m really thinking about your closing sentiment:
“This is a tale of trauma and battle. And it shows the hilarity, fierceness, forgiveness, imagination, and powerlessness of people trying to be free when the world is a shithole and it often hurts to be human. If this movie had not included the violence, it would have been a cute fantasy. It’s not a cute fantasy, but it is a deep and beautiful one.”
As a trauma survivor, who like you, grew up around addicts, I also appreciated the un-anesthetized portrayal of people struggling to love themselves and each other. But I find myself of two minds. I hold this recognition and appreciation in one hand, and my uneasiness with Zeitlin’s relationship to the story in the other.
I really appreciate your heart-filled and thoughtful comment. I’m thankful for the opportunity to “talk” more about the film — I think anyone who’s seen it can agree it is rich with the ore of conversation and self-reflection.
Carrie, I love how nuanced and complicated your response to the movie is. I’m also thinking so much about what you’re saying, the layers of it. I was worried, while watching the film, that it was going to go toward the Noble Savage angle of racially fucked up representation, but I thought the tiny specific and weird details (including, especially the fantasy scenes, like how Hushpuppy imagines her mother lighting the stove when she walks by as her father describes his attraction to her) added some grit to that well-greased chute. I also thought Zeitlin broke convention by writing a story where a father raised daughter (even though the father was clearly ambivalent about it and lived in a separate house), rather than leave her with a woman in the community or leave her with the shelter. The shelter scene gave some particular insight, and it’s where I thought most about the whole “Noble Savage” trope – especially when Hushpuppy appeared with her hair done and her little church dress. I saw her and I though “Oh no, they’ve braided her hair, poor thing.” And then I knew I was being interpolated into this idea that it’s better to be “Wild” or “a Beast” than it is to be “Saved” – and I thought, “This seems to me a lot like arguments that happened when a lot of missionaries were converting a lot of indigenous people and poor people all over the world, and I wonder why it’s happening right now again, at this moment in history.” So I spent a lot of time during the film thinking about how this movie was intervening in public discussions and national mythmaking at this moment in history. It has to be intervening in some very resonant way, or else the audiences at Sundance and Cannes wouldn’t have found it so striking. It’s saying something in a familiar enough way not to make the audiences of international filmgoers/filmmakers feel threatened, and in a new enough way to make them feel exhilarated. Maybe the familiarity comes at the expense of the black adult characters, who are given such well-worn roles, but whose particularities within those roles, and their contexts and relationships, allow the characters to seem more human than caricature or ideal. And the fact that Wink and fantasy-mom were allowed to be both ethical and shitty, both wise and selfish, undermined the ease of saint/sinner representation, which I (and I can hear that you too) appreciated. You know what I kept thinking though? All those little girls with all those drunk men – those little girls aren’t safe there. Because I’ve determined for myself, based on my experience, that it’s definitely not good for anyone when drunk men use little girls sexually. Or drunk women. Or anybody. So I was thinking, Oh dear God, all these little girls are going to be or have been hurt in that way (if this were a documentary or real life rather than a fantasy/allegory), and why aren’t they talking about how REALLY horrible it is for them to be so disempowered but also so fiercely protective of their communities and families – which is a complicated feat, and not what the movie was going for. At any rate, I love hearing how deeply this film shakes you and about all of your emotional and intellectual responses to it. Can you imagine how amazing it would be if all filmmakers and writers could make work that set such fires? One thing I do think about the Director/Writer (fetus) is that I have no way of knowing, beyond public interview performances, what his historical and ethnic background is, including his race, his love/spirit, his relationship to poverty, or social justice, or any of that. I know he’s a fetal Jewish guy from New York who went to Wesleyan and didn’t get an MFA and that he has some real confidence and courage. He may be a dick, and probably is sometimes. He may be a great guy, and also probably is sometimes. He may have no clue about the history of abuses of representation of people of the African diaspora, or he may have taken a class in college, or he may have spent his life studying and thinking about and researching these abuses. So, like you, I mostly have to reserve my comments to my own experience of the film and my own concerns about how it’ll be taken by people I care about and by people I feel threatened by (some of whom are the same people). But also I just kept thinking “There’s a little black girl with an afro as the hero, a little black girl as the hero, omg, a little girl, a little girl with an amazing imagination and wisdom and storytelling ability, a tiny black girl as the hero! FINALLY!!!” and I was maybe just so blinded by that joy, similar to the joy of representation I experienced when reading Butler’s Parable of the Sower (OMG a 14 year black heroine cult leader!), that I may have given the flaws of racial and gender representation a bit more wiggle-room than I would have if Hushpuppy would’ve been a boy or looked white. Carrie, thank you so much for your thoughtful review and response, and I look forward to continuing the discussion. xox Anna Joy Springer
Interesting review. While I don’t quite agree with you on the father-daughter relationship, I understand where you’re coming from. In the case of Beasts of Southern Wild, I guess for me there’s so much to like about this film and everyone involved in it (including the director who happens not to be black) that it works.
This for me is what Winter’s Bone was a few years ago. Winter’s Bone showed another face of drug-abuse. The face that many are unwilling to acknowledge and be transparent about. While the media might paint the picture that drugs are dealt and abused predominantly in neighborhoods that are urban and black, Winter’s Bone was decidedly rural and white.
Beasts of the Southern Wild also manages to flip the script. Nowadays, despite our rural and beginnings on slave plantations, blacks are seen as city slickers. We never went to summer camp (strange, I did). We can’t swim (strange, I can). This misconception is immediately subverted within the first 5 minutes of BOTSW. These people are survivors. The know and respect nature. They’re at home in a rural landscape.
And I gotta say this might be the most nuanced depiction of a black father I’ve seen on screen in quite some time. They totally nailed the “stoic” nature of many black fathers. The quiet strength, like a western cowboy. (Blacks were cowboys too ya know). Usually straight white men are the only ones who can have that kind of quiet confidence. Wounded, brooding, at times coming up and interacting with people but in his natural state preferring to be alone. That was this father. And for every mean-spirited moment with the father, there’s a tender one, too. All if this came through extremely clearly for me and so again I credit everyone involved, from the black actors to the non-black director. They nailed it!
Just got back from seeing this compelling and was so grateful to find this thoughtful reflection of a really compelling movie.
I am a white woman, who finds myself increasingly writing from points of view that aren’t directly based on my experiences of gender, race and class.
Ms. Love’s commentary is a powerful reminder of the dangers and rewards of such attempts.
She helped me understand my own discomfort in some of the depictions in Beasts of the Southern Wild and that helps me better reflect on my own work, its meaning, and its problems.
There’s a lot of honesty in her review, and I thank her for that too.
Kimberly, it seems to me the first task is to see one’s own relations to ‘race’ and sex with acid clearness. Then one should be able to confront anything – is as someone said you take enough time to know the people you’re talking about.
OK what if the characters had been white? or red? or yellow? or brown? because they’re black and their behavior conforms to some preconceived notion of the black stereotype, you’re ready to dismiss the work?
please people you need to stop being so narrow-minded in your perception of what is artistically possible
After watching the film I discussed it with two African American employees in the movie theater who had seen it and were as disturbed as I was by the stereotypical depiction of the father character. In its portrayal of African American life at the margins by an outsider “Beasts” ranks with The Help, Bird,The Blind Side etc. Made on a smaller budget, artier, and a little more metaphorical, but offensive all the same.
Within the first 10 minutes Wink has established himself as a profane alcoholic abusive parent who allows his only child to sleep alone, in her house no less, and motherless to boot, wallowing in filth.
I didn’t see enough of a “nuanced” performance to adequately contexualize Wink’s dysfunctional behavior to nullify the stereotype. Hollywood has raised to an art form its degradation and denial of black mens’ dignity; I see this film as further perpetuation of a tradition begun decades ago – “angry,black, drunken daddy”, that truth be told Toni Morrison helped to popularize in the 1970’s.
I cringed to see yet another “damaged’ and incompetent African American a father erupt in fury when the first time a white character interacts with his daughter, showing her how to use silverware to eat shellfish ( symbolism not lost on me), shouting in his perpetual drunken state that she must eat the crab with her bare hands, tearing it into pieces with sloppy brutality. Noble savage? Not EVEN that. Great acting? Who CAN’T play a drunken fool?
And where do Wink and his cronies find the money to be drunk in nearly every scene? They’re drinking beer from bottles no less, leading us to surmise they’re spending their money on booze while allowing their children to barely survive in squalor.
Nothing in this film resonated with my experience of living among African Americans courageously raising children in the most difficult of circumstances.
A teacher role model calling children “pussies” and saying “your ass” instead of “your” placed this film, for me, squarely in the realm of Hollywood-produced prime time sitcoms, i.e. minstrel shows, such as House of Payne and Homeboys in Outer Space.
I’ve enjoyed following the discussion above and thank all the contributors for their unique insights. Great website Rumpus!
Torrents of the film are carrying viruses
Why do people turn a perfectly good movie into an issue about a “raging/angry black fathers” or other stereotypes? It was a good movie, plain and simple. Being bi-racial myself…i looked at the characters for what they were going through, where they were located and what they brought to the film. It never ONCE crossed my mind as,”Why do they always portray black men that way,” or “Why are they trying to portray blacks who are southern that way.” Really? If thats all you took from this film, then you’re as closed-minded as you THINK other people are about race. This film had not a DAMN thing to do with race, but with Southern people trying to survive post-Katrina, and try to keep their land and way of life.
I am not a good film critic – and a white Jewish male from NYC – but I just saw this film and it easily surpassed my expectations.
The film was written around the actors and their input. The director saw four thousand young girls before settling on the one that played the lead. It was her reactions and personality that largely informed his script.
The father is actually a baker in real life, with his own shop. He refused their requests to play the father three times – only conceding when they vowed to work around his schedule. They even took time to allow him to train a new baker to fill in for him and keep his business afloat while he went off to make this art house film.
They had almost zero expectations for the film. They hoped to recoup their investors’ money, and perhaps make some, in order to make another film. They are a film collective, and the director is mostly influenced by directors like John Cassavetes and (in my opinion, based on his interview) Mike Leigh.
I believe this is a film that is actually one of a kind. I think the working style of the director is so rare (again JC and the inimitable ML are the only two I know who did/do it well) and so hard to proceed by, we should look more to applauding this kind of film-making, and not just the actual end result – this rather brilliant, impactful, film.
I can’t imagine why people are not more floored that a young black unknown actress – the youngest to receive a nomination for Best Actress in Academy history – has pulled off one of the rarest and most original representations of her very, very powerfully depicted self in the history of cinema. She was six years old when they teamed up to make this film.
I understand that race and gender and the male gaze are all critical to this web-site’s world view, which of course is fine. But I wanted to make sure we don’t overlook that both Wink, and even more so Hushpuppy are probably two of the most complexly drawn black folks in the history of our cinema. And Hushpuppy is perhaps the only complex black child actress ever to come across on film with such power.
My only (perhaps a bit old fashioned) critique is I was uncomfortable with Hushpuppy running around in her underwear in the first scene of the film. She is, by any definition, a beautiful child, and I think her body was too uncovered – I felt similarly in the Wes Anderson film Moon Rise Kingdom when the young girl was skimpily attired. I don’t like the trend.
T
“They even took time to allow him to train a new baker to fill in for him and keep his business afloat while he went off to make this art house film.” What on else could you do in a third world economy – This is the real world.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.