American Honey
Director: Andrea Arnold
Writers: Andrea Arnold
Stars: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, McCaul Lombardi
Runtime: 162 minutes
Plot: A teenage girl with nothing to lose joins a traveling magazine sales crew, and gets caught up in a whirlwind, as she crisscrosses the Midwest with a band of misfits.
Review: The first American feature by British director Andrea Arnold, is a road movie that rambles all over the place. It is not so much unstructured as structure-less. Its freewheeling approach is entirely in keeping with its characters and subject matter. The characters here are a bunch of hippy misfits who roam across Texas and the Midwest in a minibus. On one level, the film stands as a travelogue, a cinematic equivalent to Robert Franks' photographic project, The Americans. Like Franks, Arnold is looking at many different sides of contemporary US life through the eyes of her observant heroine, Star. The film is shot with handheld camera in a documentary-like way - but there are also strange and sudden bursts of lyricism.
Arnold also pays exhaustive attention to the natural world. There are beautiful shots of dusty landscapes at dawn or dusk - and a few scenes in which we see Star trying to rescue insects. As she tries to sell her magazine subscriptions, Star comes across oil workers, ready to spend a small fortune for companionship, earnest Christian moms, doe-eyed kids liv
ing in absolute poverty and wealthy modern-day cowboy-types. She has a very tempestuous romance with Jake under the eyes of the gang's leader, Krystal, a tough, jealous and mean-spirited wrangler who is very glamorous in a blue collar way.
For all its longueurs, it is a rich and rewarding reworking of the road movie genre - a film that is as original as it is exasperating.
Abridged from Independent UK
Comments