Author: Clint Worthington

Consequence of Sound

It’s been eight years since writer/director Benh Zeitlin made his breakout debut with the entrancing magical-realist fantasia Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film that garnered raves out of Sundance and an Oscar nomination for its first-time director. And yet, his latest film, Wendy, feels like it could have been made the following year: another tale of childhood imagination set amid the backdrop of a rust-coated bayou fantasy land, with non-professional child actors at its center.

This time, Zeitlin’s eye turns to a bayou-chic retelling of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories, re-centering the tale on Wendy (Devin France), the young daughter of a working mom at a New Orleans greasy spoon who finds herself, along with her twin brothers (Gavin and Gage Naquin) tagging along with a mysteriously puckish boy named Peter (Yashua Mack) to a mysterious volcanic island that keeps them young forever. It may tread on similar territory as Beasts, but an older, wiser Zeitlin seems more aware of the looming tragedy of growing up, and yearns to find a balance between the two.

Following its Sundance debut in January, we were rather taken with Zeitlin’s Malick-ian aesthetics and creative reconstitution of the Peter Pan story. Now, in celebration of the film’s wide release today on February 28th, Consequence of Sound sat down with Zeitlin to talk about the long, slow process of bringing Wendy‘s rag-tag fantasy to life.

On what he’s been up to since Beasts of the Southern Wild

Just this! I’ve been making the movie this whole time. It really took seven years to make. We had the idea at Sundance; I remember talking about it before just as we were realizing that this crazy thing was going to happen with Beasts. Then it was a year promoting Beasts, and really just straight out of that. I traveled to Montserrat in 2013, and spent the better part of that next four years scouting incredibly remote locations and rewriting the script based on that.

The casting process was extremely extensive, trying to find all these kids. The way I work in the process, everything affects everything else. So that entire time, you’re discovering the movie, and everything is shifting and being developed. And the kids needed to a lot of time to learn how to swim, sword fight, jump off a bridge, you know, all that kind of stuff. So there was a real sweet spot, when they were the right age to shoot the film — not too young, not too old. There’s kind of a dance of figuring out exactly when the right point to go was, which turned out to be 2017.

On waiting for the kids to grow up enough to shoot the film

Wendy (Searchlight Pictures)

When we cast Yashua Mack, who plays Peter, he was five years old; he could barely read, barely swim. That was across the board, none of these kids have any kind of acting training whatsoever, but they’re incredibly talented. It really took about two years to get to where we felt they were at a point where they could own their characters and control them, and where we had a script that matched up with who they were and where they were going to be able to excel.

On directing non-professional child actors

Wendy Wendy (Searchlight Pictures)

It’s different for each actor, honestly. You’re on all the time, you know. I’m usually inches away from the actor, that’s where I like to be on set. I’m not sitting behind a monitor, I’m, like, right there in the scene with the kids. We spent years getting to know each other rehearsing, to really have an understanding of what makes them tick. But a lot of times, it’s just visceral. It’s like being a football coach or something like that. You’re trying to amp up the energy or trying to push emotion. Even when the cameras are rolling: “Again, again, louder, louder, louder.” You sort of pump yourself up.

On having a sense of play on set

Wendy (Searchlight Pictures)

That’s kind of key. If it’s not fun, the kids won’t like it. That’s the thing where you most quickly go from a good performance to a bad one — if the kids aren’t having fun. And oftentimes, film sets are truly not fun places. So it’s a real dance to keep the set their playground, while also getting the film shot. It’s always a struggle.

On finding the perfect Peter and Wendy

Wendy (Searchlight Pictures)

There aren’t two people in the world that could have played these parts, you know? When you find them, it’s absolutely right. Devin [France, who plays Wendy] actually comes from a town like fairly close to where [Beasts of the Southern Wild star] Quvenzhané [Wallis] is from, like 15 minutes away. In Louisiana, we did a massive grassroots casting search. We’re in schools, we’re trying to find kids that have raw talent, but have never had the opportunity before. And it’s not like a lot of these schools have theater programs; we’re trying to find real kids who have a spirit that connects to the character.

She came to a library right by her school. You meet her, and she’s not necessarily who you imagine, she doesn’t look or act like what you wrote, but there’s some sort of spirit that connects with the themes of the film and the character. A lot of times, I’m looking to learn who the character is from a real person whose life experience or personality connects with the character. So for her, it was this mix of her incredible bravery, but incredible sweetness, in a way that felt like the two things were connected. I remember noticing that in her.

For Yashua, we wanted to find a kid for whom play and joy and mischief was everything. We wanted someone very young, who was kind of at that stage before you really start thinking about the consequences of your actions in any real way.

On taking the classic Peter Pan story in a new angle

Wendy (Searchlight Pictures)

Peter has been a myth and a character that persists throughout my life. Me and my sister Eliza [Zeitlin], whom I wrote the film with, we decided early we didn’t want to remake anything, or even tell the original story necessarily. It was about taking the framework of the myth and telling a new story with those elements and those themes. The thing we were really interested in, especially for me, was this tension between care and freedom, this feeling that, as you grow up you have to make a choice: you can choose to be wild and free and do whatever you want. But if you do that, you do it at the expense of having family or children, you know, and that you have to sacrifice one to make the other. I think that experience is something I was certainly thinking about and felt universal.

On conceptualizing his version of Neverland

Wendy (Searchlight Pictures)

There was an early idea that the source of youth was going to be a volcano. We wanted to take the things in the original text that felt like fairy magic, or totally distancing, things that made it a pure fantasy and connect them to the real world. So this idea that the volcano was going to be the source was central, which of course doesn’t leave you with a lot of options.

But I’d heard of the island of Montserrat before from a friend who’d grown up there, and I was just blown away by the natural beauty of the place. It wasn’t just that the volcano has incredible rainforests and these towering cliffs over violent beaches and rock formations. It was just a spectacular, natural wonder. Then also, I started connecting with the people there. I spent the better part of four years there writing the script and scouting.

We had incredible friends, allies, and help on the island to make a film, nothing that had ever been done before there. We have to build the infrastructure from the ground up, and it was a true adventure.

On designing the giant Tinkerbell-like ‘Mother’

We wanted to push the limits of what could be done with practical underwater photography. What you’re looking at with the Mother is not CGI. We started off with a 35-foot, diver-operated underwater light-up puppet, which has to be one of the most complicated things anyone’s ever tried to build for a movie. It was all designed by my sister and Jason Heymer in LA, and an amazing team of artists.

We had this idea that she comes from the heart of the earth, and we wanted to connect Mother Nature to joy in this really intense way where, when nature is joyous it’s connected to youth, and the sort of things that keep us alive and young. We wanted nature to be protecting these children in this, and to give that a voice and a character.

So we started at this idea that she originated at the center of the Earth, like breathing off of hydrothermal vents. We looked at a lot of the microscopic organisms that live there, combined them and then blew her up to massive proportions.

On bringing Dan Romer back to do the music

He’s my greatest collaborator. All the music I’ve written for films, I’ve collaborated with Dan.

I’m a very primeval songwriter, and he’s just incredibly fluid and adaptable, a brilliant writer and orchestrator. The whole score [forWendy] started in a bar: I had the beat in my head, so I pounded on the table and sang the song that the Mother sings, you know?

That was our starting point. We knew the bones of the score were going to be a lullaby of sorts, the songs that a mother sings to a child. So there were two central lullabies, the one Wendy’s mom sings to her and the one the mythic Mother sings to the Lost Boys.

Those two melodies were the framework, and then we wanted to bring a new, frantic, youthful energy to the score, just anxious striking violins with wood. Things that felt like, if you tossed a kid into a room full of garbage and orchestra instruments, what would they do with it?

On making films about children’s experiences

I think my films are an expression of how I see things, and each film has its own choices and aesthetics. But yeah, the messiness and the chaos is something that I’m really attracted to as a process. My favorite films often are ones where the director clearly just saw every moment of it and just executed it to total perfection, like a Coen Brothers film or something like that. For me, what I love about making films is the journey and the experience and interacting with the world via a story, and letting those elements teach me what the film is and guide me and take me places I never expected to go. That process is one I really love and I’m going to continue to make my work in, I think.

I’m not only going to make films about kids! I think that was a continuation of the experience of working with Quvenzhané and watching her be Hushpuppy, then watching her grow up as a person. A lot of those themes led me to Wendy, you know. It felt like there was another movie to make about an older young girl. There was continuity there. This one has led me to think about old age in ways I’m excited about. I think, for me, one film is always going to lead me to the next, and there will hopefully be a flow to that as I continue to make films.

—

Wendy is currently in theaters via Searchlight Pictures.

Wendy’s Benh Zeitlin Recounts His Seven Years in Neverland
Clint Worthington

Consequence of Sound

This review was originally part of our Sundance 2020 coverage.

The Pitch: Toiling away in the heat and poverty of the Louisiana bayou, Wendy Darling (Devin France) lives with her twin brothers James and Douglas (Gavin and Gage Naquin) and hard-working mother Angela (Shay Walker) by the train tracks, and dreams of adventure. One day, adventure comes knocking in the form of Peter (Yashau Mack), an impish child wearing a tattered school jacket and climbing the night train, bringing the Darlings along with him. Before long, they’re on a mysterious island where active volcanoes roar at every turn and no one seems to grow old.

Kill Your Darlings: It’s been eight whole years since Benh Zeitlin’s debut — the whimsical, lyrical children’s adventure Beasts of the Southern Wild — became one of 2012’s surprise breakouts and turned co-composer Dan Romer into a household name. In the intervening time, Zeitlin was hard at work creating his followup, a ruggedly fantastical reimagining of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan mythos into the Beasts aesthetic.

Whether you like Wendy will depend almost entirely on your continued tolerance for the baby-Malick stirrings of Zeitlin’s style: roving, evocative camerawork; the unpolished roughness of unknown child performers; treacly sentiment pouring from each horn blast of Romer’s score; or France’s storybook narration. At nearly two hours, that’s a lot of syrup to pour down your throat, and the unapologetic mawkishness of it all can rankle after a while, even if you’re attuned to the film’s wavelength.

Wendy (Searchlight Pictures)

Clap If You Believe: But there’s something inexorably charming about Zeitlin’s sense of childlike wonder, even through the rusty auspices of his poverty-stricken settings. Zeitlin’s script, co-written with his sister Eliza, cuts to the essential heart of play that feels central to the Peter Pan story, and reinvents it in intriguing ways that evoke the matured melancholy of Where the Wild Things Are. Neverland isn’t just some magical place: the Lost Boys’ gifts of youth are supplied by an otherworldly creature they call Mother (a kind of whale-like beastie who swims under the island and breathes an orange glow that supplies the magic at play). It’s a playground, and Zeitlin and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen adorably capture the feeling of kids finally being given the freedom to not just play in the sandbox, but to live in it too.

What’s more, there are rules to staying young: keep playing, never stop moving, and never give in to melancholy. Violate those rules, and the island punishes you, as Wendy soon learns after discovering a population of elderly shunned by Peter’s kids. It’s these moments that offer the most interesting twists to the Pan story, especially as the eventual origins of Captain Hook come from an unexpected place. Even as the meandering first half gives way to more plot-oriented storytelling as the climax nears, Zeitlin keeps the film grounded in a dream logic that, if you’re on board, feels like the kind of imaginative chaos you’d get with a child’s breathless account of a new story.

Peter Panhandle: Still, there’s plenty to be wary about with Wendy, especially when it comes to issues of representation and who’s telling whose stories. Accusations of poverty porn and appropriation plagued Beasts in the years since its release, and the white Zeitlin choosing to tell another bayou-chic story featuring young black boys or girls with seemingly magical powers is certainly a risky prospect. Here, the critiques would likely be crystallized around Peter himself, who practically embodies the racist trope of the magical black man. Peter’s unpredictability and flaws help elide that a bit, but it’s certainly a hurdle that Wendy struggles to clear.

The Verdict: For all its rough edges and lengthy asides, there’s some of that old Beasts magic in Wendy, a double-shot of Zeitlin’s ineffable twee energy that should delight those who choose to believe. Peter Pan is one of those timeless children’s stories that can survive these kinds of revisionist adaptations; it’s a fable about the inevitable necessity of growing up, and how our terrified desire to stay young can end up poisoning us. “To grow old is a great adventure,” Wendy whispers in the closing minutes of the film; it’s an obvious lesson, to be sure, but one well-earned.

Where’s It Playing? Wendy is seeing a limited release via Searchlight Pictures.

Trailer:

Film Review: Clap If You Believe In the Breathless Whimsy of Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy
Clint Worthington

Consequence of Sound

The Pitch: New York, 1977: Star Wars has just premiered, Jimmy Carter is President, and bell-bottom jeans are all the rage. Oh, and thousands of displaced Nazis are living and working undercover in America, hoping to undermine democracy and institute a Fourth Reich in the United States. (You hate to see it.) This last inconvenient factoid becomes crystal clear to 19-year-old New Yorker Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) when his grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin) is callously murdered one day in her home while he watches helplessly.

Not long after, Jonah’s approached by Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), a wealthy old friend of Ruth’s from their days in the concentration camps, who turns out to bankroll a group of Nazi hunters hoping to track down and exact revenge on the Nazis who’ve escaped justice and fled to America. Seeking justice for the death of his grandmother (and the team’s former leader), Jonah signs up for Offerman’s crusade, offering up his skills as a codebreaker. Just in time, too, as a dogged FBI Agent (Jerrika Hinton) and the Nazis themselves are hot on the Hunters’ trail.

Pacino’s List: Hunters knows it’s got a lot to juggle, which is why almost every episode runs upwards of an hour (and the premiere episode is straight-up 90 minutes). A groovy ’70s exploitation take on Nazi-hunting that also wrestles earnestly with the historical evils of Nazism and the generational trauma of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, plus comic book references? It’s a lot to tackle, and sometimes the tonal whiplash gets the better of Hunters‘ occasionally over-long episodes. Grim, poignant flashbacks of murder and torture in concentration camps pinball against groovy, fourth-wall-breaking moments of dark comedy (the rest of the Hunters are introduced in a bizarre bat mitzvah sequence, complete with stylized movie posters signifying each Hunter’s role). Pacino’s Offerman warns the comic-nerd Jonah that life isn’t like one of his funny books, but the Hunters blithely refer to their hideout as “the Batcave”.

Hunters (Amazon)

It’s Not Murder, It’s Mitzvah: But this all dovetails with the pet interests of show creator David Weil, who grew up listening to his grandmother’s stories of the Holocaust, interpreting them through the same lens of good and evil as Golden Age comic books. In this way, the hypocrisy is baked right into the show’s premise; for the longest time, Nazis have been our go-to bad guys because it’s so easy to dehumanize them, their crimes so great that we can kill them on-screen with impunity. But, Weil asks, what price do we pay for the sweet, stylized taste of revenge? As Jonah’s quest to avenge his grandmother expands into the Hunters’ more wide-reaching killing spree, we see the heaviness of what he’s asked to do weigh on him, the screams of their victims literally ringing in his ear. Like him, we get a great deal of vicarious fun out of these intricate heists meant to kill objectively evil people, especially when they’re performed with such colorful panache.

The Chabad Squad: It helps that the Hunters themselves are a dynamic lot: there’s British nun-turned-British spy Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany); Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boone), a streetwise Foxy Brown type with lockpicking skills; Joe Torrance (Louis Ozawa), the team’s muscle, a no-nonsense Vietnam vet; Murray and Mindy Markowitz (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane, respectively), the team’s tech-heads and designers, and Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor), the fast-talking ‘face’ of the team who, it turns out, is just an out-of-work actor. While much of the story is split between Jonah’s moral journey, Hinton’s agent Millie Morris and the low-level camp of the American Nazis (more on them later), the Hunters get plenty of opportunities to shine when they get down to the Mod Squad-level business of bustin’ Fuhrer-loving fools. The only weak spot so far is Lonny, Radnor playing him with Brian Fantana-level bluster to the point where it’s unclear what he actually does for the team. Also, they’re not giving us nearly enough of the Markowitzes, which seems like a waste of A-level talent like Rubinek and Kane; hopefully we get to see more of them later in the season.

Hunters (Amazon)

When You’re Reich, You’re Reich: The Nazis in question are malicious, to be sure, but hardly the Hitler-level masterminds we’ve come to expect, and that’s part of Hunters’ unexpected charm. We’ve got the calculating, stylish Colonel (Lena Olin), blackmailing senators when she’s not doting on her pet dalmatian, and Congressman Biff Simpson (Dylan Baker), a blustering Congressman with an aw-shucks demeanor hiding a devilishly fragile ego. Then there’s Travis (Greg Austin), the Anton Chigurh of the Nazi Party, a young, overeager American fanboy who does most of the Nazis’ dirty work when he’s not smugly speechifying to kids on airplanes about the eugenics of peanut allergies.

Travis is an odd duck, to be sure, somewhere between the silent menace of The Da Vinci Code‘s albino monk and the darkly comic sociopathy of Killing Eve‘s Villanelle. He’s clearly meant to be a parallel to Jonah — two young men radicalized into violent movements because it gives them purpose — but in these first five episodes Travis is mostly used as for shock value. By the dozenth time he’s murdered a bound-and-gagged black family in a deadly game of ‘duck duck goose’ or shot at the Hunters while loudly singing “Dream the Impossible Dream,” you figure out that he’s just a bundle of affectations, and I’m not sure how good that is for the show in the long run.

Hunters (Amazon)

Break Out the Shag Carpet: Of course, Hunters also relishes in its ’70s setting, thanks largely to production designer Curt Beech and set decorator Cathy T. Marshall. The New York apartments feel appropriately dingy and run down; one early target’s Florida apartment is an eye-catching feast of garish wallpaper and black-tile bathrooms. The Batcave feels suitably ornate and utilitarian at the same time. John Dunn’s costumes thrum with period-appropriate style, all big lapels and high-waisted jeans. Hunters is clearly trying to fill the hole The Americans has left in our collective TV-watching diets, and on this level it doesn’t disappoint. The direction is generally strong, but it doesn’t get any better than Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s stylized camera movements and ambitious long shots in the pilot, replete with Dutch angles and single-take sequences at family barbecues that soon turn deadly.

The Verdict: It’s gratifying to see that Hunters is doing more complicated stuff than the pulp fiction Nazi hunting it implies on the box; in between the bright colors and droll needle drops, there’s a sense of grief and memory and loss that underpins all of the escapist fun the show feeds you. Like Jonah, the viewer is confronted with conflicting feelings, the pain of senseless violence and the slick appeal it can often have to the desperate. Walking out of a screening of Star Wars at the start of the show, Jonah explains to his friends that Darth Vader didn’t start out as a bad guy; he just thinks he’s defending a cause. That Weil and crew stick to their guns and keep the moral gray areas of its characters front and center makes all the giddy kitch of Hunters worthwhile.

Where’s It Playing? Hunters shows up on your television screen with leather jackets and golden Nazi-hunting daggers February 21st.

Trailer:

TV Review: Al Pacino Tracks Down Nazis in the Groovy, Haunting Hunters
Clint Worthington