BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

A reshuffling of American cinema’s sacred archetypes over the past decade has dealt us a hand of new superheroes, vampires, and arrested adolescents, so it was really only a matter of time before NOLA delta dwellers Hushpuppy and her hooch-swilling daddy Wink took their posts as the 21st century's Magical Negros.  Between handheld camerawork, heaving performances, and heavy-handed mise-en-scène – our six-year-old heroine converses with a paper cutout she’s dressed in her mother’s clothes – there isn’t much room to breathe in this tale of abject Southern poverty.  Beasts wants really badly to pull you into the everyday goings-on of its off-the-grid world, but its whimsical neo-primitivism can be a hard sell.  Timeout Chicago’s Ben Kenigsberg reads the parable as a “magical-realist apologia for Bush's failings,” and when, following a Katrina-like flood, Hushpuppy’s carefree mixed-race neighbors reject social services as a matter of principle, I’m inclined to agree.  But if the first act is dubious and the second infuriating, the final third, an elegant slide into unrestrained fantasy, is sublime.  Clueless marketers have already spoiled Hushpuppy’s climactic porcine encounter, but the last twenty minutes dissolve space and time into ambrosia of likeminded reveries.  In these moments first-time director Benh Zeitin makes good on the promise of Spike Jonze’s fatally awkward Where the Wild Things Are, and the lead performances, from first-timers Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, lend the starry-eyed enterprise more credibility than it really deserves.  Everywhere else, though, what materializes is the kind of problematic vision of hardship-as-mythos that only, well, a white guy from Queens could believe in.