The Peter Pan story re-imagined

Wendy feels tipsy and offkey right from the start

Director Benh Zeitlin follows his much-admired Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) with Wendy, a newly imagined version of the Peter Pan story that feels too disarrayed to captivate.

This time, I was put off by Zeitlin's approach. He pushes us into scenes with close-ups, eschewing anything as orienting as an establishing shot. And as the story -- stocked by a cast of children -- unfolded I couldn't help wonder for whom Zeitlin had made this woozy film. Wendy could be too confusing for kids and too literal for adults who may find the screenplay's on-the-nose dialogue and obvious didacticism more deflating than uplifting.

Wendy (Devin France) lives with her mom (Shay Walker) and her twin brothers (Gavin and Cage Naquin) in a small Louisiana town where mom runs a diner located next to the railroad tracks.

Yashua Mack portrays Zeitlin's waif-like Peter Pan.

But let's begin at the beginning. After a short introduction to the diner and Wendy's home life, she and her brothers hop a freight. On an earlier night, Wendy had spotted Peter running ghost-like across the top of a passing train, leaping from car-to-car. Wendy may only be 10, but she's already wondering whether small-town life might be uneventful and boring. Where's the adventure? She's heard Peter's call of the wild.

Fable trumps logic and Wendy and her brothers wind up on a volcanic island where Peter and his crew of Lost Boys are committed to remaining young forever.

A glowing sea creature that the youngsters call "Mother" lives off the island's coast and seems to be the source of the boys' eternal youth.

But wait. It turns out loss can begin the aging process. When one of the twins vanishes, his broken-hearted sibling begins to age. One of his hands takes on the withered look of old age. Duly alarmed, he invites Peter to stop the onslaught of deterioration by cutting off the offending appendage.

Adults inhabit the island, too. These withered folks look like aging hippies and evidently were unable to maintain their perpetual youth. Lest the proceedings endorse romanticized notions of the way wildness dies when children begin to grow up, Zeitlin makes sure that Wendy learns that growing up also qualifies as an adventure, too -- perhaps the greatest adventure of all.

Images float by like boats unmoored from a dock as Zeitlin makes references to some of the trademark characters (Captain Hook, for example) of J.M. Barrie's original. The kids make a lot of noise and so does the movie, which includes underwater sequences, steaming geysers, and a volcano that long-ago erupted and killed most of the island's residents.

Focusing the film on Wendy gives the tale a girl's spin. It's not enough, even with numerous sequences that exalt in the joy of childhood play. Opinions surely will vary, but I'd call Wendy a sophomore misfire and leave it at that.

The stormy life of a six-year-old

The primal imagery of Beasts of the Southern Wild can leave you shaken -- partly because of the film's fable-like rawness and partly because first-time director Benh Zeitlin strives for (and sometimes achieves) a near-visionary quality.

Using a non-professional cast and adhering to a folk tale-structure, Zeitlin has made a movie that has become -- with some justification -- the darling of this year's crop of indies, so much so that nothing is likely to surpass the wave of critical enthusiasm that washed over Zeitlin's Louisiana-based opus.

Fair to say that Zeitlin, who works with a filmmaking collective called Court 13, brings a fresh eye to the Isle of de Jean Charles, where the movie was shot and which has been turned into a fictional site called The Bathtub, maybe because tropical storms fill it with water and because it has a levee on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other.

Zeitlin works hard to load the movie with regional flavor, yet his imagery can push the story into a near-mythic realm. This odd mixture of specificity and timelessness gives Beasts a feeling of exoticism befitting its immersion in a part of the country that will feel unfamiliar to most audiences.

The story centers on six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), a girl who lives with Wink (Dwight Henry), her rough-edged father. Although the movie ultimately provides a rationale for the way that Wink treats Hushpuppy, his behavior sometimes seems abusive.

Hushpuppy sleeps in a different ramshackle facility than her father: He's constantly pushing her toward what he regards as the independence she's going to need to survive in a place where lethal storms constantly loom. Fable or no, I found Wink off-putting -- at least initially.

It's tempting to say that Wallis gives the movie its heart, but it's not exactly heart that she conveys; it's more about her nearly preternatural strength. Considering what happens in the movie -- a terrible hurricane which evokes memories of Katrina -- Hushpuppy will need every bit of fortitude she can muster.

Zeitlin doesn't attempt to conceal his concern for the environment: He shows images of the melting polar ice caps and also includes shots of wild beasts -- they're called aurochs -- which suggest that The Bathtub (and perhaps by extension, the planet) is under siege by rebellious natural forces that have grown tired of being abused.

In this instance, nature's vengeance, if that's what it is, is directed at folks who are the least guilty of defiling their environment. Folks in The Bathtub make use of the detritus and junk of a larger society with which they have only limited contact.

Because of the performances of Wallis, Henry and other locals, Beasts stands as a testimony to American idiosyncracy, as well as to the kind of close-knit communities that can develop among those who live outside the mainstream.

When it counts, the residents of The Bathtub pull together to help one another survive, and even in the face of adversity, they're surprisingly good-spirited.

I can't say that Beasts makes total sense, but it takes us places that we haven't been before and boasts some of the year's wildest imagery thanks in part to Zeitlin's commitment to Hushpuppy's point of view. Beasts of the Southern Wild may not be a mini-masterpiece, but it makes you hope that the talented Zeitlin, who's only 29, will continue to push the boundaries of cinema in ways that we can't yet imagine.

On 'Beasts of the Southern Wild'

Few would argue that indie director Benh Zeitlin’s first film -- Beasts of the Southern Wild -- hasn't scored big. In January, the film won the top jury prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Four months later, the movie received the coveted Camera d’ Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a prize awarded for the best first feature in the festival.

Beasts of the Southern Wild was shot on the Isle de Jean Charles, a low-lying slice of Louisiana land populated by the descendants of Cajun and Native American fishermen. Beyond Isle de Jean Charles? Nothing but the encroaching waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The 29-year-old Zeitlin -- who grew up in New York but now lives in Louisiana -- battled mosquitos and 110-degree heat to tell the story of six-year-old Hushpuppy, a girl forced to deal with an impending storm that not only threatens her survival but the survival of the very ground on which she walks. To further complicate matters, Hushpuppy must deal with Wink, a father who’s hellbent on schooling her in survival, sometimes in ways that appear almost abusive.

But plot isn’t the only point here: Zeitlin and his 90-member crew captured a near-primal sense of reality as they struggled to bring a modern-day folk tale to life -- all with locals who had never acted before.

Here, then, a few words from the director and from Dwight Henry, the actor who played Hushpuppy’s father. Eight-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis was also on hand during a recent Denver publicity tour, but by the time I spoke to her, she seemed understandably bored and tired, publicity not being a favored activity of eight-year-olds. Wallis said making the movie was fun and that she wanted to continue acting, but I figured it was enough that she gave a terrific performance in Beasts of the Southern Wild without me pushing her into small talk.

The instantly engaging Henry more than made for Wallis's reticence. When he's not acting, Henry operates the Buttermilk Drop Bakery & Cafe in New Orleans's Seventh Ward. New Orleans could not have a better ambassador than Henry, who remained in the city throughout Katrina and who talks about his hometown with preacher-like zeal.

At Sundance, where Beasts of the Southern Wild had its premiere, Henry showed up with 1,500 doughnuts for the audience. Unfortunately, it was impossible for him to supply samples of his baking prowess on a city-to-city publicity tour, but you get the feeling that if he could have, he'd have been handing out doughnuts everywhere he went.

Benh Zeitlin:

“A lot of this film is about what it's like to live in a place where every year you take your chances on what's going to come. It's not set in the future, but it's about a time when the future is very precarious. I want people to think about the emotional experience of having the place that you're from wiped out. ... The film is not about Katrina; it’s about living under an assault of storms. I think that's more universal than the political dialectics around Katrina.

"Nature is way more powerful than we are. You sense that down there. There's a real respect for nature that comes living in a place where nature is so clearly powerful. It's interesting that in a place where nature is the most violent, there's the most respect for it. The people in the film are on the front lines of where nature takes back what it owns.

"Risk was embedded in every element of the film: the place, all the different actors. There were so many impossible tasks on our plate. Our mandate was never to back off any of them. But had we not found Quvenzhane Wallis, it would have been a terrible film. She's an extraordinary actress. We looked at 4,000 kids -- even before we finished writing the script.

“Directing non-actors is not so different from directing actors. ... You're trying to help people generate the emotions they have to generate for the scene. We interview for weeks and weeks before we touch the script. We rehearse every scene three times before we get to the shoot. Every time we rehearse, we rewrite to get closer to the voice of the person who’s playing the character. You have to be open to adapting your vision to the changeable elements of a performance. A lot of this movie is not from my experience, so I gained a tremendous amount through this process. I learn a lot about the world and about different kinds of people from people I chose not because of their previous work, but because they're such great people."


Dwight Henry

“Everywhere we go, it seems like people were born somewhere else. But us from Louisiana? Man, we're from where we're from. We're not leaving under no circumstances. It's just the type of people we are. We love the land that we live in. We love our culture. We love our people.
"I didn't leave during Katrina. I was in neck-high water. They had people sitting on a bridge for days. People just dying because they weren't getting medicine. It took the government days to respond to people dying on roofs. We were waiting on helicopters and boats to come to the rescue, and nobody's coming.

“Before Katrina, I had two businesses open. I lost one of them. I was able to recover and recoup the other. My business grew so well that I actually had to move from one small location and get bigger. When I opened up after the storm, there was only one business in that whole area, a tire shop. They opened up because there was so much debris in the streets and people had to get their flats fixed. I came back with so much will and determination, I opened before big companies: McDonald's, Burger King, Dominoes, Pizza Hut.

“My first business was right across the street from the casting agency. The people from casting used to come over to the bakery to get coffee and doughnuts and to get breakfast and lunch from me. They put fliers in the bakery asking for people who wanted to audition for an upcoming film.

"I never had any aspirations to be an actor. I'm a restaurateur. But they kind of seen some leadership things in me through the course of coming to the bakery, seeing how people looked up to me in the community.

"They seen some of these qualities in me and wanted me to audition for the film. One day me and Michael Gottwald (one of the film's producers) were sitting at the table talking, and I said, 'I'm going to audition for the film' I went over and auditioned, never expecting to get the part.

“My heart is in being a restaurateur. That's my foundation. I have five kids and that's something I can pass on to my kids. I can't pass an acting career on to them. In the movie, my kid is the most important person in the world to me, and I'm doing everything possible to ensure that she understands some things. (In setting Hushpuppy on a survival course, Henry's Wink can sometimes seem cruel. Henry sees Wink's behavior as education bred by necessity.) He’s emphasizing a point with urgency. It's important that when he's not there, she'll be OK. And in real life, that's important to me, too, to make sure that my children are OK."