Not wild about ‘Beasts’

Wildness in the indie drama “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a badge of honor. And to the characters who live in a fictional part of the Louisiana bayou called the Bathtub, it is also something passed down, perhaps all that can be. Parents encourage kids to eat meat with their hands, shouting: “Beast it!” The community’s resilience connects them.

But this movie, a film-fest favorite (it won the Palm d’Or at Cannes and a top prize at Sundance) that’s filled with dreamlike images and performed by nonactors, feels, for all its good intent, like emotional tourism. It recalls Terrence Malick’s work, but too easily fills “atmosphere” into narrative holes where story should be.

The film’s center is Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a 6-year-old tomboy who narrates her days caring for her ailing, irascible father, Wink (Dwight Henry), who prepares his daughter to fight through life without him.

Hushpuppy and her father’s life in the Bathtub — they and their neighbors separate themselves from the modern world by a levee — is endangered. Yet as she uses her imagination to talk to her missing mother and prepares for very real disaster, it’s nature that seems to be passing on its wildness.

Director Benh Zeitlin gets a magnetic performance from young Wallis (others pose a problem), and the movie has an ethereal quality. Yet Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar’s script, while admirably nonlinear, never makes an impact. The images are memorable mostly for seeming plucked from the (humid, palpable) air, yet they never really wash over us.