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<\/a><\/p>\nAlex writes about <\/em>Wendy, Benh Zeitlin, and <\/em>Beasts of the Southern Wild.<\/em><\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back to early 2012. A director releases his debut feature, a feature that begins as a widely adored and appreciated Sundance hit. It is released to the general public in the summer of that year, to further acclaim and profits that greatly outweigh what the film cost to make. Listening to people walking out of the cinema I saw it in, all viewers sounded resoundingly positive. In the winter, it would be nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director. It was a type of success anybody would accept. And yet its director didn\u2019t release another feature for eight years. How does this happen?<\/span><\/p>\n The picture in question, to those who have yet to figure it out is Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em>, a film that I can assure you was beloved at the time of its release but has since been widely forgotten. This is not uncommon: a look at the other nominees for Best Picture that year reveals a collection of films that had their time in the sun, but whom nobody really talks about all that much anymore. This happens at each Academy Awards, or each year in general: there are always myriad successes, but only one or two films each year can really stick in the collective consciousness for longer than an award cycle. In order to do that, your film has to be truly beloved by wide swaths of people. <\/span><\/p>\n My recollection of my 2012 review of Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em> was something along the lines of: \u201cthese special effects are intriguing,\u201d \u201choly shit does this music bang,\u201d \u201cthis sound mix is off the charts,\u201d \u201cthat little girl is great,\u201d \u201cdoes this movie have a plot,\u201d and \u201care we watching another entry into the world of indie Malick ripoffs?\u201d My companion and I followed the film by going across the street to drink the cheapest beer on the menu and eat salads that were served in bowls made out of fried dough.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI liked it,\u201d said my friend who has and shall always retain the ability to translate my longer thoughts into shorter, concise ones. \u201cIt was a nice story of a father and his daughter.\u201d I could tell from how she said it that she would probably never think about this film again, and I could tell from my reaction to this that I certainly would. I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em> two or three more times, because no matter what you say about the film it is an exciting stylistic exercise with a manageable running time, sliding into the slot for \u201cshort movie I can see to fill the gaps between two other movie screenings.\u201d I listened to the soundtrack a lot<\/i>, while writing and while cooking and while walking into screenings of Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em>. (Before my second screening was through, I recall thinking, \u201cIs this movie good, or do I just like the music?\u201d) But the day of the Oscars that year was probably the last time I thought of Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em> for years.<\/span><\/p>\n When Benh Zeitlin finally released a new film earlier this year, Wendy<\/em>, I was scoffed at for suggesting I was planning on going to see it. Of course, I didn\u2019t end up going, because I planned to see it on a Thursday. But on Wednesday, Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19, and then borders closed, and I had groceries to stock up on. But I thought a lot about why my friend would think it was silly of me to want to see it. \u201cIt\u2019s directed by the guy who made Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em>,\u201d I said, \u201cAnd I kind of feel obligated to see the follow-up.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n For reasons I honestly can\u2019t even put into words, I felt compelled to watch Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em> this past Friday night. I needed a guaranteed win, and I knew if nothing else, this short movie with an absolute banger of a score* would get me home. Watching it in 2020, I noticed a few new things that weirdly I have no recollection of hitting me in 2012. Less than ten minutes into the movie, I knew where all the 2012 success came from: this is a Terrence Malick film poured through a Spielbergian strainer, removing all the fat, upping the broad emotions, and telling John Williams to make the audience bawl. It\u2019s a short (all later period Malick movies are too long, I\u2019m told) movie about a kid (as opposed to adult children played by movie stars) and her father (as opposed to lover), there are countless gratuitous handheld shots of nature (this was left unchanged), and the music is overpoweringly emotional.<\/span><\/p>\n *I truly cannot make this point loudly enough. I think if this movie had a less exceptional collection of music running underneath it, the collective reaction would have been entirely different.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Zietlin is not the first person to take Malick\u2019s ideas and translate them to a wider audience, of course. These things are rampant; Malick kind of rewrote Hollywood film language, and people took little bits of it and injected it into their own work. David Gordon Green is the Sundance copycat, with his George Washington<\/em> being a bonafide Terrence Malick covers album. You can see it in Michael Bay\u2019s work, especially the later films, and you can see it in literally every indie movie set outside of a metropolis (and most within as well). Christopher Nolan remains the king of the Malick thieves, filling his movies with brief handheld cutaway shots to signify a different time or a different memory. Malick will be remembered as the Velvet Underground of filmmakers, the man whose work was widely ignored by everybody but filmmakers, and ridiculously influential to those who picked up a camera with a compulsion to tell a story.<\/span><\/p>\n Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/em> has a lot of conflicting ideas in it, and I felt the return of a lot of my own conflicting ideas from 2012. I still feel like this film might be at least vaguely racist, although I couldn\u2019t put the why into words in 2012, but it mostly revolves around a white filmmaker making a film about predominantly black characters. Although, of course, Zeitlin and his team encouraged those actors to have a lot of agency over their characters in the production. When the film was released, there was much talk of Zeitlin\u2019s Court 13 production collective and their collaborative approach to filmmaking, a collaboration that reached all aspects of production.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s so many facets that you can really bring everyone you know together, who you care about, who\u2019s talented, who has a good heart, and they can find their way into creating something good for the movie, provided you allow the individuals working on the film to have agency and to be able to express themselves, which I think is the hardest thing about when you go to work on a traditional set,\u201d Zeitlin told Scott Foundas in filmcomment in 2012. \u201cThe creative hierarchy is incredibly regimented and the people actually touching the stuff that ends up on screen don\u2019t have any love for the things they\u2019re making. Even if the designer does, by the time it gets to the person actually painting that or sewing it together, there\u2019s no feeling in that actual task.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Zeitlin\u2019s approach was to listen to everybody, writing and rewriting dialogue to fit actors after improvisation sessions, and to listen to any idea that might come up during production. (Again, not all that dissimilar from Malick\u2019s style of filmmaking, or Cassavettes, another Zeitlin touchstone.) This feeling of freewheeling creativity permeates the film, and Zeitlin\u2019s job with his post-production team was to (arguably) tie all the exploration together.<\/span><\/p>\n
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