Beasts of the Southern Wild
201290 minutes
rated PG-13
Opening June 27th in select theaters.
By Scott Mendelson
Beasts of the Southern Wild is among the most transporting films you're likely to see. Director and co-writer Benh Zeitlin, using Lucy Alibar's play Juicy and Delicious, crafts a fully enveloping world that is both pinpoint specific and all-encompassing enough to be a timeless fable. On the surface, it is a character study of one six-year old girl as she comes to terms with the possibility of becoming an orphan as a natural disaster devastates her dirt-poor backwoods community. Yes, it's about people surviving Hurricane Katrina and yes it contains certain social/political commentary, but it is a universal saga of grief and survival. The film's greatest narrative strength is that it refuses to be a representative saga of the impoverished victims of that 2005 storm. It is merely a heart-wrenching would-be myth told from the point of view of a single child.
