“Where Crawdads Sing”, Delia Owens’ first novel is one of the best-selling fiction books in recent years, and the new movie version helps to understand why.
While streamlining Owens’ elaborate story and staying true to its tone and theme, director Olivia Newman and screenwriter Lucy Arival (“Southern Beast”) weave a court drama around romance and personalize it. It’s also a hymn of resilience and a wonder of nature. Celebrating a wild and independent heroine, the film has a decorative and calm atmosphere, like a book, a country club luncheon.
Set in the coast of North Carolina (taken in Louisiana), “The Place Crowdad Sings” spends a lot of time in the vast sun-drenched wetlands that heroines call home. Unapproved residents of a village near Berkeley Cove call her a “swamp girl.” In court, she is addressing as Catherine Daniel Clark. We know her as Kya.
Played as a child by Jojo Regina and Daisy Edgar-Jones (known for her role in the “ordinary people”), Ca is a perfectly coherent collection of familiar literary metaphors and features. If not, it’s fascinating. Abused and abandoned, she’s like a fairy-tale orphan princess, stoic in the face of adversity, and skilled in how to survive. She’s a wonderful, beautiful, tough, innocent, born artist, intuitive naturalist, scapegoat, and close to a superhero.
That’s a lot. Edgar Jones has the decency, or perhaps brave courage, to play Ca as a fairly ordinary person who finds himself in situations where it is an understatement to describe the unlikely. Chara live most of their lives outside of human society, within the flora and fauna of the swamps, and can even resemble the wildlife imagined by the townspeople. But most of the time, she looks like a skeptical and practical young woman who wants to be alone, unless she doesn’t.
Ka attracts the attention of two young men. One is Tate (Taylor John Smith), the son of a dreamy blue-eyed fisherman, who shares his love for shells, feathers and related creatures. As a kid, they became lovers as teenagers, and Ca was confused with Chase (Harris Dickinson) until Tate went to college. Chase (Harris Dickinson) was found dead at the bottom of a fire lookout tower deep in the wetlands.
Eventually, but again from the beginning. The movie begins with the death of Chase in October 1969. Ka is charged with murder and her trial alternates with the story of her life so far. Her mother (Aana O’Reilly) and her brother escaped the violence of their abusive alcoholic father (Garret Dillahunt) and eventually took off, putting Ca on a metal motorboat and a fixedr upper with a screen. Stay in possession-with a pouch and a curious and creative spirit.
“The place where Crawdads Sing sings” took place in the 1950s and 1960s, and as evidence of the film, the United States, especially the southern United States, was safe for decades. Being like Kya’s hermit — she goes to school for a day and doesn’t learn to read until Tate teaches her and runs out of radio and television — feels a bit like an alibi of separation from movie history. The local store where she sells mussels and gas by boat is run by a black couple, Jumpin'(Sterling McEl Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt). themselves.
The status of Ka’s outsider, supported by the presence of David Strathairn as a lawyer like Atticus Finch, gives the film a concept of social interest. Equally faint is a hint of Southern Gothic that sometimes scents the wetland air.But when it comes to sex, murder, family secrets, and class grudges, the temperature is terribly calm, as if a Tennessee Williams play was sent to. Nicholas Sparks For rewriting.
Where Clauded sings
It is rated as PG-13. Wild but tamed. Execution time: 2 hours 5 minutes. At the theater.
