Movie Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild

I used to tell my students that one way to determine one's quality of life is to receive a stimulus (song, painting, poem, film, etc.) and then see how many references it activates as it bounces around one's brain. Many references, high quality. While watching "Beasts of the Southern Wild," and thinking about it later, the references were numerous. I thought of Max from "Where the Wild Things Are," the denizens of Cannery Row from Steinbeck's famous work, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, James Lee Burke's Robicheaux novels, Delta blues and more. In other words, "Beasts" was a rich experience for me, a gumbo made of ferocity, love, longing, extreme poverty, fantasy and hope. Hushpuppy, played by the unknown and astoundingly vital child actor, Quvenzhané Wallis, lives with her alcoholic, terminally ill father in the "Bathtub," a group of small impoverished Gulf of Mexico islands on the wrong side of the levee. Every action in Hushpuppy's life requires extreme physical exertion and confrontations with danger just to survive, but she is driven by an intuitive understanding that everything is connected and that reconnecting those driven apart by poverty, sickness, environment and loss is the only way to survive the chaos waiting to be unleashed at any given moment. Determined to find her mother and save her father, Hushpuppy battles overwhelming odds and we silently cheer for her at every minute. This is a courageous movie made on a small budget that deserves to be seen by anyone who admires honest film making, and it doesn't hurt that it comes along when so much is in doubt in these fragile times.