With Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Benh Zeitlin emerged as one of America’s most unique filmmakers. The magical realism continues with Wendy, a film that shares many features with its predecessor. Like Beasts, Wendy is set in working-class Louisiana and stars a girl-child protagonist whose point of view is prominent throughout. We’re not watching her but seeing through her eyes. Water is a prominent element in both films.
Wendy’s title character is a white girl (Devin France) growing up above her mom’s diner located alongside rattling, rumbling railroad tracks. Her neighbor, Thomas, insists he will become a pirate. “I ain’t gonna be no broom and mop man,” he declares. Wendy glimpses him dashing away by jumping on a passing freight train. Several years pass: Thomas’ face is on a Lost Boys poster; he’s deemed a missing child, but Wendy knows he wasn’t kidnapped. He just got away.
Wendy is narrator as well as protagonist, and her voiceovers echo her evolving sensibility. “I will tell you the story of children who fly away… all the way to the edge of the world,” she says early on. In a clever update of Peter Pan, Wendy and her two brothers jump a train where they encounter an African American girl who guides them to the edge of the world—a magic volcanic island with pop-up geysers and a benign sea monster in the lagoon. Thomas is there, playing pirate. It’s a place where children never grow old—or so it seems at first.
Let’s say without too many spoilers that Wendy begins her journey on the assumption that adulthood is a fate to be avoided. As one of her brothers puts it, “The more you grow up, the less time you have to do what you want to do.” Which is often true, and yet, growing up and assuming responsibility for one’s life (and others) can be at least as much an adventure as escaping to Never Never Land.
Zeitlin’s particular genius is his ability to poetically visualize the fantasy life and perspectives of children. The smoky roar of the locomotive idling alongside the diner is like dragon’s breath. Odd angles are favored as Wendy explores her physical surroundings. Yellow school buses and adults tower overhead. The cameras, like Wendy, spend a lot of time looking up with wonder at the world.
