Rhapsodies

For this week’s selection I went with two American fantasies. Tall Tale and The Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Tall Tail is a heavy handed attempt at a swan song for an idealized myth of America from the point of view of a jaded young boy, played by Nick Stahl, as he travels through a mythic version of the frontier meeting legendary heroes Paul Bunyan, John Henry and Pecos Bill (played by Patrick Swayze in the last role I remember seeing him in.) diminished by the progress of industry and the real world.  Together they struggle to save the boy’s town from robber barons leading to a battle against traditional country values and steampunk industrialists.

Being a fan of American folklore, this movie was fun but for whatever reasons, budget or a lack or imagination, didn’t even come close to the potential it could have had.

The Beasts of the Southern Wild is something else altogether. Set in a a suffering but proud vibrant community on “the other side of the levy’s” called the Bathtub, director Benh Zeitlin creates a wonderfully realized world separate but next to the one we know had me thinking of a modern Dogpatch in the bayou all through the eyes of a little girl named Hushpuppy. The beauty of this is while we see what Hushpuppy sees , we comprehend more than she does. For example early on her father shows up after missing for several days in a hospital gown. Hushpuppy never knows what happened to him. We can see that he escaped from a hospital where he was being treated for the unspecified disease he is dying from.  In the process we see a modern day fairy tale that celebrates life and community in defiance of the community’s eventual doom as it sinks into the sea. Quvenzhané Wallis was a delight as Hushpuppy and I can’t wait to see what the rest of her career holds for her.