When a movie tells its story exclusively from the point of view of a six year old, it has to be somewhat limited because the child doesn’t understand anything it’s seeing, and it can’t articulate anything it’s feeling. Thus is the case with Beasts of the Southern Wild. Aside from the sometimes striking visuals of the disappearing, hardscrabble life portrayed in the movie, what is the point of this film? I’ve seen it advertised as a story of a child who goes on a journey to find her mother – that’s a laugh. The child doesn’t go anywhere until the final 10 minutes of the movie, and even then it’s not so much a journey as an absurd accident. I’ve seen it advertised as a story of love and courage – that’s also a bit of a stretch. I don’t see that the kid changes at all during the course of the film, and I would classify the rest of the people as more inert than courageous. As a portrait of these people and their dying way of life it’s kind of empty and unsatisfying because there’s almost no dialog, and the “way of life” depicted is to drink beer, eat crayfish, and drive around in gas-powered boats made out of rusted old car bodies. Then there’s the metaphor of the giant beasts, returned to again and again in the film, which I found to be bizarre and at best tenuously related to the story. In the end, I just couldn’t see anything in this film.

If Beasts of the Southern Wild had come out during the Indie Renaissance of the 1990’s, it would have been dismissed as a lower-half offering that didn’t really work except as a visual exercise. Now it is the proud owner of an absurd Oscar nomination for best film. And I honestly could not tell you what Quvenzhané Wallis’s Best Actress nomination is based on. She’s not bad, I suppose, but she’s acting like just about every other six year old I’ve ever seen in film. Are six year old characters even interesting enough to support a “great” performance? In what way is her performance better than Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s fabulous performance in Smashed, for example, which was completely ignored by the Academy? And even compared to other child performances, I’m not sure she was so great. Her face is largely expressionless, she’s not really a part of the film’s dialog, and her narration is unscintillating to say the least.

I don’t know what to tell you about this film. In the final analysis, it strikes me as a colossal bore.