A visually fascinating film with no easy answers: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is quite unusual and very good - interesting to look at right from the first frames, apparently shot on location in small communities on the Louisiana Delta, and featuring most or maybe all amateur actors and nonprofessionals cast just for this movie; the movie in some ways calls to mind the great Pan's Labyrinth, both in its focus on the mind of a young girl often in conflict with tyrannical and crazy father, and especially in its use of flashes of symbolism and fantasy to highlight and prefigure elements of the young girl's thinking. At times we see scenes of wild animals - loosely based on wild boars (her father keeps one in captivity) and the extinct oryx (she sees a tattoo of one); at other times we see the polar icecap melting and crumbling - as two examples; but Beasts is not a fantasy film - it's a realistic drama, full of tension and of ambiguities. The young girl, Hushpuppy, lives with her father who is quite cruel to her many ways, but also at times very loving and playful - it's hard to get a reading on him, which is part of the beauty and the complexity of the film; they live in a very supportive and friendly impoverished community, so we feel that someone will look out for H's welfare even as her father slides deeper into illness and alcoholism, but the adults in the community are well-meaning yet not all that competent - there's a lot of drinking and general neglect of the welfare of others. The heart of the story is the reaction to what is apparently Hurricane Katrina, as the father keeps Hushpuppy on the small island (called the Bathtub) through the storm, against all advice; after the storm, everything is in ruins, but the few survivors resist attempts at resettlement. H. finally flees from her father, learns or at least surmises some things about her mother, whom she has never met (most likely, we learn, mother was a barmaid or prostitute), and finally H. is reconciled with father as he is dying (not very credibly, alas). A tight movie, with strong characterization and fine acting (a little too much V.O. for my taste), always visually interesting and viscerally powerful (you'll gasp at some of the scenes, such as the fire in H's "house"), a strange mixture of pastoral idyll and brutal rural poverty that leaves us with questions about the extent which we're responsible for the lives and well-being of others - no easy answer here, except that it's clear this young girl should not be left in the care of her father or of her dissipated neighbors either.