Beasts of the Southern Wild

5-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) eke out a meager but seemingly happy existence in the Bathtub, a sort of "based on a real location" version of the wilds of the Louisiana bayou which exists on the other side of one of the levees that protects the population centers further north.  When the big storm hits and others flee the danger of the Bathtub for more solid ground, Hushpuppy and Wink (along with some of their neighbors) choose to ride out the storm at their homes, come what may.  The storm brings complications which threaten their community, and Hushpuppy has to find a way to survive both the encroaching influence of the authorities, as well as Wink's failing health.

Katrina was a seminal event for New Orleans, and for America at large, but the low-lying parts of Louisiana are constantly under threat, both from storms (smaller storms than Katrina can do quite a bit of damage) and from the slow rising of the level of the sea.  Beasts of the Southern Wild plays directly into our post-Katrina understanding of this part of the world, but the status quo of the Louisiana bayou is much more tenuous than perhaps most people realize.  There is something to be said for the maintenance of that status quo, and there is something to be said about the way Katrina affected the lives of the people even further down the totem pole of American society than the forgotten residents of the Ninth Ward, people like Hushpuppy and Wink who exist on the very fringes of society itself.  The problem with Beasts is just how little it establishes why that status quo is worth saving, and why anyone should look on the life that Hushpuppy is being raised in as anything other than borderline child abuse.  And I use that "borderline" very hesitantly, not only because Wink is not above physical abuse, but because the life Wink has chosen to give Hushpuppy on the bayou is one that is constantly on the edge of even mere subsistence - there is a scene in the film where she nonchalantly cooks up a pot of pet food to eat.  Hushpuppy goes to a version of school along with a handful of other children living in the same area, but her teacher seems more interested in apocalyptic tales of Biblical-level destruction than in teaching them the basics of learned society.  These kids are basically a lost cause for true societal integration before they've even had the chance to make that choice for themselves, and while I find that idea deeply troubling, the film very clearly takes for granted the notion that the threatened existence of these people is something to be treasured.

Wallis gives a surprisingly subtle performance as Hushpuppy, although the movie mostly asks her to be spunky and fiesty - she was nominated for an Oscar, which seems a little gimmicky, but her performance certainly works within the context of the film.  Henry's performance as Wink is a significantly bigger problem - he was famously cast as a non-actor, and while he's not a complete embarrassment by any stretch, he is constantly putting the needle in the red where a defter, subtler touch is called for.

Director Benh Zeitlin unquestionably has an eye for bringing out some of the beauty of this part of the world, although he has a predilection for shaky-cam shots that gets a little tedious after a while.  I don't doubt his sincerity about wanting to tell a story about the forgotten denizens of a forgotten place, but that sincerity excuses too many terrible choices being made by the film's characters, particularly Wink.  I can understand why some people have fallen in love with this film, as its moments of triumph and catharsis are beautifully staged and shot.  But they betray a hollowness at its core that I could never get past.  Wink and his neighbors may choose to live in a meager libertarian paradise, but that doesn't mean I have to condone the choice.  D+

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The expectations game can do funny things to a film's reception.  I remember very distinctly the stories that were written about The Phantom Menace when it hit theaters in 1999 after what was probably the biggest hype campaign in the history of cinema.  People liked it.  Or, rather, people found ways to like it in spite of its massive flaws, to say nice things about a film that they so badly wanted to love.  It was only after some time passed that the consensus view of the film began to curdle, and eventually rot, until it is remembered as the colossal failure that it is today.

I believe that something close to the exact opposite has happened to the first installment in the (eventual) three-part Hobbit adaptation.  The hype for this movie has been not quite as deafening (because we are used to over-hyped movies at this point, and have come to take them for granted) but has certainly been massive, and the reception to the film has been lukewarm, because the hype machine has told us to expect greatness, and the film possibly falls short.  But, in this reviewer's opinion, it does not fall all that short, and its flaws (which are real) do not begin to match its successes, which are extraordinary.

At the behest of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), a company of dwarves led by the gruff and distant Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), on a quest to reclaim their lost kingdom, take the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) with them, to serve as the group's burglar.  Along the way the company has a series of adventures, including Bilbo's fateful meeting with Gollum (Andy Serkis), which includes Bilbo taking possession of the One Ring.

That's about it.  A start to a quest, and a series of adventures that flow one into another, to a stopping place that is less an ending than a big blinking "To Be Continued" sign.  The film is basically a series of vignettes of the company running into danger and making its way back out again, the spine of which is Bilbo's journey from, essentially, baggage into an indispensable member of the group.  It is a small journey that Bilbo takes but an effective one, helped along immensely by Armitage's nicely unlikable performance.  Thorin here serves as something of a mirror image of Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings trilogy; where Aragorn was most comfortable doing small scale morale-building and being in among the men that he was charged to lead, Thorin is distant and decidedly uncomfortable with the everyday job of leadership.  It is not a small thing for Armitage to take such an unlikable character and turn him into someone whose approval we desperately want our hero to obtain.  But, in the end, the film ultimately belongs to Freeman, an actor who is able to fully realize Bilbo's warmth and courage, as well as his distinct discomfort with any day that doesn't end in a good meal and a warm bed.  Freeman's performance here is nothing short of remarkable, and it is to the film's detriment that he is not onscreen more, because he feels immediately like the most fully-realized hobbit we have seen in any of Jackson's Tolkien adaptations.

The flabbiest part of the movie, by far, is the first act, where the meeting between Bilbo and the dwarves spends altogether too much time attempting to build the dwarves into characters that never really coalesce (there are, quite simply, too many dwarves for us to really get to know anyone but Thorin; Ken Stott's Balin came the closest for me, an older dwarf who seemed to take a bit of a fatherly interest in Bilbo, but a couple of other ones also got a bit of time in the spotlight, including Graham McTavish's Balin and James Nesbitt's Bofur).  In addition, we spend way too much time with Sylvester McCoy's Radagast the Brown, who serves as the bridge between the fairly straightforward quest that the company is on and the larger events of Middle Earth swirling in the background which will eventually form the story on which the Lord of the Rings trilogy is based.  McCoy's performance, in particular, is mostly a mistake, turning Radagast into basically a weird, twitchy hoarder, and sucking any gravitas from the character completely.  The time spent with the character really drags, and could have been excised from the film entirely.

The Hobbit is a small, goofy little adventure as a novel, and film that we are presented with here is nothing of the sort, presenting a story that is just as grandly epic as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I can certainly understand the complaint that its tone does not square with the tone of the book whatsoever, but I believe that as Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, as opposed to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, it is largely successful at what it sets out to do, and I, at least, am looking forward to spending more time in this universe with Jackson and Freeman.  A-