Director channels past her past
Where the Crawdads Sing (125 mins) (PG-13) In cinemas now Directed by Olivia Newman Reviewed by Jen Shieff
Ablue heron flies over the North Carolina wetlands, introducing the intriguing world of the marsh, its trees, undergrowth, birdlife, slow-moving rivers beautifully desolate shoreline and sea.
It’s a magnificent opening sequence, with clever CGI and drone work.
In the opening sequences, the body of Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) is discovered by two young boys and police are soon looking for clues, spotting and pursuing Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), known locally as the Marsh Girl.
She’s a stereotypical outsider, regarded as something weird since, aged only seven, she began living life alone in a cabin in the marsh.
In the opinion of police and the people of Barkley Cove, the Marsh Girl is an obvious murder suspect.
Edgar-Jones delivers a convincing performance as the girl who dares to be different, the girl in the spotlight.
Flash back to half-wild Kya
the teenager, befriended by local lad Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) who tenderly coaxes her out from the bushes where she hides from the world.
He brings her special feathers to add to the collection she painstakingly illustrates.
Tate knows about Kya’s affinity with wildlife, her uncanny knowledge of the names, common and Latin, of
birds and plants.
They become lovers but Tate goes away to college and Kya, lonely and bereft, succumbs to the advances of privileged self-indulgent Chase Andrews.
A love triangle results, and Chase’s death seems to be the only way out of the bind the three of them are in.
Director Olivia Newman is no stranger to life in a cabin, after her father, a keen hunter, built one in upstate New York where she’d spend weekends and summers, with no electricity.
Similarly, hunting was familiar to Delia Owens, whose best-selling book Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) provided Olivia Newman with the basis for her film.
Having been encouraged as a child to “Go way out yonder where the crawdads sing,” it is no wonder Delia Owens grew up to become a wildlife scientist and creator of the character Kya.
Kya is a keen observer of wildlife, including crucially, those crawdads, freshwater crayfish, which do indeed make a singing sound, but it’s very quiet, as are the ways in which some species kill to survive. In the film, the relationship Kya, having been arrested for the murder of Chase, has with her lawyer, Tom Milton (David Strathairn), is particularly carefully crafted, likewise the relationship Kya, subsisting in the marsh, has with African American storekeepers, Mabel and Jumpin’ (Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr).
The caring Mabel and Jumpin’ show towards Kya, and the deep understanding the three of them have, make nonsense of the bigotry that’s rampant in 1960s Barkley Cove. Finally, there’s drama and soul searching in a court case reminiscent of the one in the classic To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960), but wait: there’s more. The next scenes change everything. Recommended
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