Through the opening scenes of this largely terrible film I was pondering some variation on “Carson McCullers as reimagined by Foghorn Leghorn”. It is set in the American South. Bodies turn up in swamps. Paw wallops the little uns. Doo, dah! Doo, dah!
If only the film had an ounce of that promised chicken-fried Gothic. Box-fresh and laundered to a fault, the blandly attractive characters spend their time wandering along shorelines as if in an evasive American television commercial for prescription incontinence medicine (warning: Where the Crawdads Sing may cause nausea and drowsiness).
There is not a rough angle in the piece. The older characters conform to ancient, sometimes offensive soap-opera stereotypes. The younger male leads are so weirdly interchangeable — exercises in rural Stepford — that name tags should have been issued to help us tell them apart. Daisy Edgar-Jones does her best, but no actor could make sense of the insanely compromised protagonist.
Based on a novel by Delia Owens that I’m not going to read, Where the Crawdads Sing plays out in flashbacks as a murder trial drags on in what we’re told is 1969. Some period detail would have been nice, but that might interfere with the familiar sub-Nicholas Sparks ambience.
A body of a young man has been found at the base of a fire tower in the swamps surrounding a small North Carolina town. Working from no evidence speak of, the cops arrest the young woman they call the “marsh girl”. We learn that Kya Clark, abandoned by siblings and parents, has grown up alone in a rundown house dappled by the light that filters through hanging Spanish moss.
“Fall gave way to winter, winter to spring, change the only constant in nature,” she intones in monologues that do little to recommend the singularity of Ms Owens’s prose.
Her resilience is extraordinary. Abhorred by everyone in town apart from the wise and cosy African-American couple who run the store (Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr), David Strathairn as a cos-play Atticus Finch and off-the-peg sensitive hunk Taylor John Smith, Kya grows up into the most unlikely sort of success.
In short, she becomes a well-dressed, sparklingly clean suburban woman with teeth a Kardashian might envy. Of course popular cinema always makes such concessions, but so little of the wild child remains that the film, particularly in its later moments, makes no psychological sense.
The storytelling veers between soap-opera cheese and middlebrow literary puffery. The former does, at least, have the virtue of being unintentionally hilarious. Strathairn, wearing regulation white suit as Kya’s defence attorney, sidles up to the unfriendly witness and, after lulling him into a false sense of security with his corn-pone charm, produces a bloodstained squirrel from his pocket. “Perhaps this will refresh your memory!” The court bursts into muttering. “Rhubarb, rhubarb, squirrel, rhubarb, rhubarb, grits, rhubarb, rhubarb, chitlings.” Details have been altered to avoid spoiling the largely predictable plot.
The quasi-literary hokum is worse. Kya keeps the ashes of a burnt letter from her mother in jar. In one excruciating moment, she and the more kindly of the two hunk-clones spot a swirl of descending leaves and, spontaneously deranged, take to prancing around in the busy foliage. We are constantly reaching for a transcendence that the humdrum material cannot hope to sustain.
None of the cast is bad. If you want crinkly charm then Strathairn is your man. Harris Dickinson inflates a bit of air into his limp cad. Edgar-Jones gets through her first major studio movie with dignity intact. But this really is meretricious hogwash of the feeblest dilution. Foghorn Leghorn need not beware.
