“Beasts of the Southern Wild:” The little movie that could

Don’t you love it when the little guy shoulders his way in to play with the big boys?

First-time director Benh Zeitlin began production with limited resources and unknown actors, and co-wrote a magical realism film with Lucy Alibar, adapated from her one-act play Juicy and Delicious. In January of 2012, Beasts Of The Southern Wild won the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival as well as winning the Camera d’Or award at Cannes. Before you knew it, it catapulted to mainstream attention, earning four Oscar nominations this year (Best Picture, Directing, Actress in a Leading Role and Writing [Adapted Screenplay]).

This post-Hurricane Katrina fable film is centered on a feisty little girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), who lives with her ailing father Wink (Dwight Henry) in the Louisiana Bayou on a remote island coined “The Bathtub.” Cut off from the industrial world, they live within a community of fellow cast-offs. From the get-go we’re introduced to Hushpuppy’s narrative that exudes childlike wonder. With a darling wisdom, she connects herself to the universe, nature and how even the little parts fit with the big. With a powerhouse of resilience, her legs charge over and through the debris of her environment as Hushpuppy listens in on conversation between animals. Between musings on the ice age and prehistoric monsters, she keeps a brutal reality intact and tackles every circumstance at hand with a bulldozer spirit. Occasionally, she belts a primal cry to a mother who “swam away,” as her father told her, and later she plans a quest to find her. We follow her journey, her attempt to unify it all in her imaginative cosmic map. “I want to be cohesive,” she chirps.

Quvenzhane Wallis was only six years old when cast for the role of Hushpuppy. Now at the age of nine, she’s seated as the youngest actress nominated for an Oscar in a leading role. Besides the magic of the film as a whole, it’s magic before your eyes to see the instinctual, pure performance of such a young talent. I’m not even going to attempt to figure it out. It’s just that "magical" quality of talent that's bestowed on a rare few. Wallis demonstrates the weight of Hushpuppy’s journey in what I’d call “old soul” eyes. It’s as if prehistoric ancestors are channeled through her. Even weightier is the poverty she endures upon a patch of crumbling land. Yet any fear of drowning in that reality is tamed as the script sings poetic through Hushpuppy’s sweet imagination. Somehow the litter in which they live offers up a quirky romanticism. Especially with the film’s score, pregnant with a saucy banjo that has your hand smacking your knee as you watch Hushpuppy race along with firecrackers that light up a sticky Southern night. The harsh makeup of living in The Bathtub never subsides. There’s fighting with a dying father and animalistic survival while floating into the flooded wetlands. Part teacher, part medicine woman, Miss Bathsheba (Gina Montana) instructs the young ones while tending to another girl’s fever spell, “The most important thing I can ever teach you: You gotta take care of people smaller and sweeter than you are.”

Stark lessons tower for one so young, whether it’s rendering a catfish lifeless with her tiny fist or watching her father die. And, boy … these two have some knockdowns when his temper flares. It’s tough to watch in a couple places. I felt like I was watching Animal Planet when a mother lioness smacks the cub over the head. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful love between them, one that a chainsaw can’t split. Thick and rich like gumbo sticking to your ribs. When it gets just a little too tough or messy, Hushpuppy retreats into her makeshift cave---a box of cardboard, her own little Lascaux in the devastated bayou. Pressing a black crayon into the surface she doodles a self-portrait, recording her existence for “scientists in the future … In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know once there was a Hushpuppy ...”

Watching the film a second time, I had to remember the actors here were unknowns. I’m still amazed. Especially by Dwight Henry (who portrays Wink, Hushpuppy’s father). He’s a baker and was cast while they stopped in his bakery for coffee each morning while shooting. Though how he was cast is rather fun and interesting, it was his own sense of family, being a father, that really gave fuel to the character. I’m not a parent and even if I were, it’s ridiculous of me to assume how the parent-child relationship "should" be in this film. Cultural relativism kept rearing its head for me, but the film drove home one common underpinning. It’s our personal, unique context of what justifies a life of wealth, a loving family, and also what constitutes a familial setting. Beasts of the Southern Wild produces this lullaby, fantasy quality and at the same time serves it with garbage strewn around a busted-up trailer where Hushpuppy rests her sleepy head.

During a scene of forced evacuation, those living in The Bathtub are sent to the sterile and chilly scene of a“shelter.” My husband watched it both times with me; "It’s a bit depressing” he noted in a couple of places. For myself, I didn’t feel it was depressing in how they lived. More depressing was another taking away that freedom of how to live. Who chooses the architecture of their living space? It’s not one of physical wealth in The Bathtub. But there’s tremendous wealth in their hearts. I was reminded of the powerful and startling work of documentary photographer James Mollison. His book, Where Children Sleep, is a journal of photographs taken all over the world in the bedrooms of children from various socioeconomic statuses and cultures. The images are incredibly powerful and provocative, as evidenced by the social media response to the images. One commenter on Facebook remarked, “Aw, how terrible children should have to live that way!” Okay, which way? That’s their reality, which may not be congruent with the framework of your reality. Though they are entirely different from one another, we naturally measure the worth of another and their livelihood upon ours. Hushpuppy wouldn’t give it much mind; instead she has a mystical knowing of how the little things fit with the big ones in the universe. She has the mysteries of the cosmos, and all those prehistoric monsters by the balls with her tiny fists. Kids can do that. I’m envious. So, how can I not cheer for the little guy? Like Hushpuppy, we’re all looking to be cohesive.