Beasts of the Southern Wild - interesting but aimless

This film caught the attention of many (including myself) earlier this year when its young star Quvenzhané Wallis was nominated for the prize of best actress as the Oscars.  She was in the end well-beaten by Jennifer Lawrence, but the impressive fact is that Wallis was the youngest ever person to be nominated in that category.  The nomination is perhaps even more exceptional when you realise Wallis's background, that she was effectively pulled off the streets and lied about her age to play a character who was supposed to be much older.  It's a story that makes Beasts of the Southern Wild an interesting prospect.

The film is about a young girl (named Hushpuppy - played with ability far in advance of her age by Wallis) who lives on an island called Bathtub that sits off the southern coast of Louisiana.  Hushpuppy lives with her father, a man who suffers from violent outbursts which serve to harden Hushpuppy against the realities of the natural world around her.  The denizens of Bathtub see themselves as connected closely with the natural world, living as they do on both the social and physical outskirts of the modern USA they hardly connect with modern America at all.  When a great storm passes through Bathtub many people are killed and the others are forced to live on a series of rafts while the wait for the waters to recede.  All the while we are shown images of glaciers cracking and large beasts rumbling their way across the world - metaphors perhaps of nature's intention to clear humanity off the Earth like so many species before us?

After watching the film I stumbled across a number of heated debates going on in and around the IMDB discussion forums.  Whereas some people thought the film to be a tear-jerking look at innocence and the fragility of humanity, a vocal minority are expressing the view that the film is hopelessly racist, chock full of Victorian era stereotypes and references to the 'noble savage' trope.  Posters on IMDB seem to have missed that many of the inhabitants of Bathtub are in fact white, and that to equate Hushpuppy's apparent connection to the natural world with the 'noble savage' concept isn't really fair.  After all the people of Bathtub aren't really portrayed as an idealistic tribe a la Pocahontas, rather they are people who happen to live on the front line of a natural disaster.  If anything they hark back to traditional ideas of US expansionism of the colonial era, where self-sufficiency outside of government control was the holy grail for the intrepid souls trekking their way into the wild west.

I felt that the people who had made this film were trying to aim very high, but without really finding a target.  They start off with a lot of imagery that's all about humanity's connection to the natural world.  Hushpuppy's teacher tells her about evolution, how things are destined to change and how we need to adapt along with them or die.  It all seems like it's going to mean something.  Hushpuppy then goes in search of her mother and finds something which may or may not be what she was looking for.  Then when the beasts finally arrive at Bathtub (yep - it's not a metaphor, they're real apparently) nothing really happens.  Then it's over.  I wonder if the people on IMBD who are shouting racism are doing so before they're trying to find the meaning, but when they come up with a blank they're lashing out and accusing the film of being evil - rather than just a bit aimless.