For example the little girl, Hush Puppy lives in what I took to be a metaphorical post-Katrina 9th Ward of New Orleans called The Bathtub. In spite of squalid poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, garbage just everywhere and really repulsive “pets,” we find a “happy” band of really horrid looking and badly behaving residents on what Hush Puppy takes to be a daily holiday. It’s Fellini a la Bunuel. Unexplained things keep happening and behaviors keep occurring that are not properly explained, resolved or understood, certainly not by us and apparently not even by Hush Puppy. On top of this there is a fair amount of seemingly gratuitous didacticism. Folks in the Bathtub think they are better than those rich folks living on the other side of the levy because they know how to survive in spite of their perpetual partying, substance abuse, inadequate shelter, poverty and mental illness. Sounds to me like a perfect recipe for disaster in any but the most addled imagination. This is a truly repellant romanticism. There is a whole lot of preaching about the imminent impacts of Global Warming and the physical and spiritual consequences of mankind’s lack of care of the planet. For me it just sounded preachy and didactic.

There are a whole lot of unexplained situations and occurrences that just required too much unearned suspension of disbelief. For example there seems to be a ready supply of electricity and natural gas to the set. We see an operational stove and fully operational electric lights (practicals as filmmakers call them) in the scene and yet Hush Puppy’s father keeps decaying chickens in an ice cooler that has to be far more impractical and useless than the most antiquated electric or gas-driven refrigerator. The existing refrigerator looks to be used as a storage closet for non-perishables.

At one point we find Hush Puppy and her father adrift in Lake Pontchartrain in front of a large new levee. That’s where the conversation about the survival of the Bathtub population takes place. They are floating in what looks like the flatbed of an old pickup truck. Never mind that such a craft would sink like a stone, there appears to be no way they got in the middle of the lake, no apparent reason for them to be there and no means to propel this unlikely craft. Now I can see a dozen or more ways a director with a modicum of talent or creativity could have created a suspension of disbelief sufficient to make this scene work. This director chose none of them.

Throughout my brief attempt to view this film I kept thinking of how Terry Gilliam handled a very similar theme in Tideland. In comparison Beasts of the Southern Wild seemed inappropriate, clumsy and artless. I could go on with detail after detail of the many ways my viewing of the first twenty minutes of the film pissed me off, but as they say, “Ars longa, vita brevis”—especially in the case of bad art.

Peace,

Bob Boldt