Beasts

“The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece… the whole universe will get busted.”

That’s a quote from Hushpuppy, the six-year-old girl at the center of Beasts of the Southern Wild, an independent film now in limited release, including the Belcourt in Nashville, where I saw it the other night. The film tells the story of Hushpuppy and her father, a single dad called Wink. They live on the Lousiana bayou, on an island the locals call the Bathtub. The island lies outside the levee that protects the nearby city, and when a hurricane hits, Wink and his friends refuse to evacuate. Hushpuppy and her dad wake up the next morning to find the Bathtub flooded, which is just the start of their crisis.

What makes the film so effective is that it’s told from Hushpuppy’s perspective. The viewer gets to experience the off-the-grid world of the Bathtub through the eyes of a six-year-old, eyes that see a bit more magic in the world than we grown-ups do. Early in the film, a teacher tells Hushpuppy about aurochs, giant prehistoric creatures that once roamed and dominated the land, but now exist only in cave paintings. Hushpuppy thinks that, to those creatures, she would have been nothing more than breakfast, and so the aurochs come to symbolize for her the kind of disaster that ends the world, or at least her world. Throughout the movie we see cut scenes of aurochs making their way to the Bathtub, telling us that something bad is coming. It’s not clear until the end of the film what disaster the aurochs represent–and how Hushpuppy will respond to it.

We also see Hushpuppy’s father through her eyes, and it’s their relationship that gives the film life and power. Wink is, by many standards, a bad father. He spends most of his time drinking and carousing with his friends, he’s rarely gentle with Hushpuppy, and he’s outright abusive on occasion. But he also knows that Hushpuppy has a hard life ahead of her, and he wants her to be strong and independent enough to survive that life. “My only purpose in life is to teach her how to make it,” he says at one point in the film.

It’s clear that Wink cares for her, but he struggles to knowhow to care for her. My situation is very different from Wink’s, but I empathized with this struggle. Sometimes I feel unequipped to raise up my children, too, especially as a single dad raising two girls. One of the ways Wink deals with this gender difference is to treat Hushpuppy as a boy. There’s a great scene of the trailer of Wink and Hushpuppy shouting to each other, “Who’s the man?!”, for instance.

As I said above, what makes the film so effective is that it’s Hushpuppy’s story. There’s a charming authenticity in how the film presents the perspective of a six-year-old. As the father of a former six-year-old and a current four-year-old, there were many moments where I thought, That’s just how a little kid would think about something! I’m sure it helped that the lead actress, Quvenzhané Wallis, was a six-year-old during filming and that she wasn’t a trained actress–just a natural talent with a piercing scream and an ability to burp on command, according to reports.

Because we see Hushpuppy’s life from her point of view, we know that she loves her father in spite of his many flaws. I can’t help but take some hope from that, hope that my little girls love me in spite of my flaws, too.

Beasts is a great movie, beautifully filmed and scored. Go see it, if you haven’t already done so. And if you have seen it, let me know what you thought about it in the comments below.

Image: “Lascaux Cave Painting,” Prof Saxx, Wikimedia Commons (CC)