By James Murphy
The Reese Witherspoon produced court room murder mystery meets Gorillas in the Mist environmentalist saga based on Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, Where The Crawdads Sing, is embroiled in controversy, as the tale’s narrative arc and moral compass is potentially derived from a dark origin, the content of which cannot be discussed without spoiling a Six Sense or Empire Strikes Back level twist ending. Any review of the film, then, is potentially tarnished by pre-judgement, like a juror determining the fate of an accused who possesses a bad reputation, like Crawdad’s protagonist, Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who was known to North Carolina locals as “the marsh girl”. Crawdads is a cinematographically stunning, powerfully performed work of cinema that is compelling so long as you accept the world that has been created but, sadly, there is too vast a gulf between Delia Owen’s fiction and reality to ensure this necessary suspension of disbelief.
Crawdads opens with a murder investigation, and Kya is swiftly charged over the death of the town’s star quarterback, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson). As a social pariah living alone in the swamps, Kya is vilified by almost the entire town, but not by the Atticus Finch of the story, David Strathairn’s Tom Milton, who offers to represent her in the trial. Kya relates her story to Milton through flashbacks to her childhood, where her mother and then her siblings fled her war veteran father’s domestic abuse and then she was abandoned even by him too. Left alone in the wild, Kya became part of the wilderness, with only three lifelines of support: love interest Tate (Taylor John Smith), and African American shop keepers Jumpin (Sterling Macer Jr) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt). A love triangle between Kya, Tate and Chase ensues before Tate’s mysterious demise. Daisy Edgar-Jones is captivating, a natural wonder, and her magnetism atones for the many plot holes and narrative flaws.
Kya’s obsession with the natural world mirrors novelist Delia Owen’s own life as an environmentalist in Africa. The exploration of the dichotomy between modern Western culture and the natural order, and the relativeness of morality is fascinating and resonates in a time when modern humanity’s environmental destruction is readily apparent. Kya’s capacity to survive and thrive while left abused and alone as a child, though, is difficult to fathom, and is too fantastical to believe in the context of the naturalistic court room genre. Worse than that, by allowing a character to emerge comparatively untarnished from such horrendous abuse, Crawdads risks underplaying the damage caused by domestic violence and unfairly places the emphasis on individual resilience in the face of such abuse rather than the need for social supports.
With over 12 million copies of the source novel sold at last count, Crawdads is a culturally significant work that has been faithfully depicted on screen, delighting fans and dividing critics. As for the film’s morality, that is for viewers to judge for themselves.
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