Movie review: 'Beasts of the Southern Wild'

For once, believe the hype. Since taking Sundance and Cannes by storm, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" had been a cause célèbre in film circles, one of those films lionized by filmmakers and critics but next to no one has actually seen.

The film sprang out of nowhere, with a 6-year-old lead actress and a novice leading man who was hired from behind the counter of a New Orleans bakery. The screenplay was dreamlike and strange, the production crew was inexperienced and the guerrilla shoot was barely controlled chaos. Yet it's one of the most singular and assured debuts in American film history. Now it can finally be experienced in all its impressionistic audiovisual glory.

And what glory it is. It fills the screen with visual poetry that plays like intimate documentary. The sheer primal force of its imagery is intoxicating yet never precious. The film is great art at its most artless.

The setting is the Bathtub, a low-lying Louisiana Gulf Coast island whose dirt-poor residents have a precarious, unfettered, off-the-grid life.

Our heroine and narrator is Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a wild child with a waterfall Afro. She lives with her tough-loving daddy, Wink (Dwight Henry, the baker). Life is hardscrabble, sometimes frightening, but not unhappy.

The film weaves in and out of people's lives without a story, but in doing so tells thousands of stories. Impressionistically, director/co-writer Benh Zeitlin shows us how people in the community spend their days. The kids play. So do some grownups -- playing so hard they sometimes wake up under a table the next afternoon.

At the school, Miss Bathsheeba (Gina Montana) warns her pupils that the sea level will rise, wiping away the community. Hushpuppy accepts the information, but doesn't comprehend it. She's just beginning to sort out the universe. "Me and my daddy," she explains, "we's who the earth is for." Hushpuppy believes that the comforting voice in her head belongs to her departed mother.

The film unfolds as a tapestry of vivid, unforgettable scenes. Wink's fishing boat is a floating pickup flatbed. He teaches Hushpuppy to fish by catching catfish barehanded and then punching them unconscious. They inhabit his-and-hers shacks. Seriously ill, Wink devotes himself to toughening up his little girl to survive when he's gone. If that means that she dines on a tin of fried cat food, so be it. Zeitlin shows his characters' beleaguered, hopeful lives with uncommon respect. His film discovers a strange beauty in squalor and an admirable tenaciousness in holdouts who refuse to be airlifted to safety on the mainland.

Casting nonprofessionals in the film's top roles heightens the feel of reality. Wallis is irresistibly watchable and emotionally compelling, a pint-sized hero who can stand up to the scariest challenge. Henry's performance makes wild unpredictable hairpin swings through pride, anger, melancholy and delight. Through it all he's so distinctively earthy you never feel he's acting a part.

There may be a handful of moments when the dialogue comes across awkwardly, but the feelings communicated are spontaneous and undeniably real. If one quality about this beautiful film impresses me more than another, it's how little it tries to make a statement about anything. It hews to no aesthetic or political party line. It is simply life, seen through the kaleidoscope eyes of a brave, imaginative child.

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

Four out of four stars.

Rating: PG-13.

Where: Lagoon.