‘Beasts of the Southern Wild' director Benh Zeitlin defends film

EARLY OSCAR contender "Beasts of the Southern Wild" has been adding theaters to its release, riding a wave of acclaim and the backlash that inevitably follows. The movie is polling a solid 86 percent on rottentomatoes.com, and the consensus is that its ultra low-budget story of a little girl (Quvenzhane Wallis) learning from her father (Dwight Henry) to survive in a dying Louisiana delta town is utterly unique and emotionally powerful.

Some dissenters, however, think the movie is a condescending portrayal of impoverished people made by dilettantes who soak their characters with romantic clichés about ennobled poor.

We had a chance to ask accused dilettante and director Benh Zeitlin about assertions that his movie paints a rich kid's rosy view of poverty.

"In my opinion, that's a total misinterpretation of the film," said Zeitlin, part of a 70-person DIY artists collective that raised its own money, bought its own equipment, wrote its own screenplay, composed its own music and pulled non-professionals off the street in New Orleans to comprise the cast.

What so baffles Zeitlin about the criticism is that he and his collaborators were not trying to create an actual world, but an obviously mythic one. The movie is populated with imaginary creatures that represent the little girl's fear of forces that threaten the land around her and threaten the people who live there. Magical boats appear from nowhere to rescue floating orphans, folk remedies heal the sick, and folk tales explain the order of the natural world.

"It's a utopian world that doesn't judge people. There is no politics, no religion, no money. Everybody is in it together, in a way that is obviously impossible in our modern world," said Zeitlin, whose fanciful community, called "the bathtub," is also racially harmonious and diverse.

"There is no money in the bathtub, and people have a hard time imagining a world without money, but the economy of the bathtub is rich in food, rich in culture, and it thrives, in its own way," he said.

Zeitlin said the movie certainly has real-world inspiration — the Queens, N.Y., native and Wesleyan University grad moved to New Orleans a few years ago with friends and became intrigued by the post-Hurricane Katrina culture, its fragility and also its resilience.

He visited Delta towns outside the levy system, such as Isle de Jean Charles, which disappears every day as the river and ocean swallow it up.

Zeitlin, steeped in our modern, urban culture of grievance and complaint, was impressed by the matter-of-fact courage exhibited by the people facing the loss of the only world they had ever known. He made that courage a dominant theme in his movie.

"The people have a fearlessness and they impart that fearlessness to their children," he said. "I don't know why that is not in our culture more. I feel like pop culture type of parenting is all about fear. Movies are all about fear. Politics is all about fear. And here is this parent raising a child to be fearless. [The girl's father] lets her fall, then he picks her back up."

It's an ethic he saw everywhere in the barrier-island communities that survived Katrina and the BP disaster.

"No one feels sorry for themselves. That's what's so inspiring," he said. "With what people have been through, with oil spills and hurricanes, you don't find people moping around and whining about it."

No moping? No whining?

No wonder the residents of the bathtub strike so many people as hard to believe.