Time marshes on
The 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was a massive bestseller, whose 15 million copies sold make it by far one of the biggest literary successes of the 2010s and among the 100-odd bestselling novels of the last hundred years.* It's also a book I hadn't heard of prior to the spring of 2022, so I'm not in any position to talk about anything, but I do think it's fair to say that any film adapted from a book with that kind of massive built-in audience is going to be very focused on carefully managing the text and rather less focused on trying to reimagine it for a new medium. And it is very hard not to notice from within the film's opening seconds that Where the Crawdads Sing: The Movie is extremely "literary". Most obviously, the entire film has a first-person narrator, Catherine Danielle Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones) - "Kya" to her friends, "Marsh Girl" to her enemies, who substantially outnumber her friends. There seems to be very little reason at all for the film to have a narrator at all, given that director Olivia Newman has done a pretty fair job of succinctly doling out the crucial information about character relationships in a cleanly-staged early montage, and there's nothing else other than those character relationships that might conceivably be confusing enough to justify narration. But to not include narration would require Newman and screenwriter Lucy Alibar to make some thoughtful changes to the narrative spine of their movie, and plainly that was out of the question. At least, I hope the narrative spine here was taken directly from the novel; I would be terribly distressed to think that somebody took a functional story and decided to do this to it.
Put simply, this is structured as a murder mystery and courtroom drama, with the massive bulk of the story taken up in flashbacks. On 30 October, 1969, a body is found; despite a virtually complete absence of evidence, the only suspect is Kya, partially because of substantial (and accurate) rumors that she was romantically involved with the deceased, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), partially because everybody in the town of Barkley Cove, North Carolina thinks that she's a dangerous lunatic, having lived her entirely live in the wild marshlands on the Atlantic coast, and having lived quite alone since the time she was 8 or 9 years old. So she goes on trial, with one of the few locals who likes her, Tom Milton (David Strathairn) representing her as defense attorney.
And while this goes on in the framework, Where the Crawdads Sing travels back in time, showing us how Kya got to this point in three extended time periods. First is 1953, when as a small child, Kya (Jojo Regina) lived with her mother and three siblings in fear of her abusive, alcoholic father (Garret Dillahunt). Over some period of time (despite using specific years as onscreen titles, the film seems to be very indifferent to how much time is passing on a sequence-by-sequence level), all of her family members flee his wrath, until it's just Kya left; she figures out how to survive his ire, but that doesn't keep him from leaving one day as well, and so Kya is all by herself in a rural shack, learning how to raise money by harvesting mussels and selling them to a local couple of shopkeepers who are some of the only other people who like her, Mabel (Michael Hyatt) and Jumpin' (Sterling Macer, Jr.). In1962, the now-teenage Kya falls in love with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), the last person in town who likes her, and he encourages her to turn her various notes and drawings of the various natural elements around the marsh - shells, insects, birds - into a book. But then he mysteriously disappears, and we finally end up in 1968, where Chase forces himself into Kya's life, and is very obviously Bad News. Even she realises he's Bad News, but it's better, at that point, than being alone for a 16th consecutive year.
Laying it out in a paragraph like that undersells how... blobby the story structure is here. There's virtually no ongoing logic for when we jump back in time to Kya's past; the flashback moments don't really "speak to" the present moments, except in some broad sense of illustrating how much of an outsider she has been her whole life. And the three chunks of time that make up those flashbacks feel very disconnected from each other, presenting a summary of a life rather than the life itself. The gap between Tate's disappearance and Chase's arrival, in particular, is just a strange, strange ellipsis, assuming that at least a few years of Kya's life were basically just hanging out in the swamp, chilling.
But you can see the logic, even so: the childhood flashback is exposition, the adolescent flashback is first love, the 20something flashback builds on first love and catches us back up to the first scene. It's inelegant and not terribly satisfying, but it basically works. The bigger issues come at a smaller scale, where some combination of Owens's source novel and Alibar's adaptation of it keeps smacking into these little random cast-off scenelets that don't, like, do anything. E.g. we're introduced to Tom when he wanders into a bar where people are gossiping about Chase's death (that's one of the bigger issues here: the opening is a sluggish bit of scene-setting about the murder while the film as a whole is about Kya's life. That could work in a novel, with a more expansive canvas to work with, but it makes the film feel like it doesn't know how to get off the runway), and he says something to effect of "ever since I retired, I haven't had to care about that kind of thing." And then we see him for the second time when he walks into Kya's cell, as her lawyer. So... when did he unretire? That feels like a pretty big plot point. Later on, Kya's legal right to live in her old family shack is called into question, as is her legal right to sell it for a ton of money, and this terrible new conflict lasts for one whole scene; its solitary function is to motivate her to pursue publishing her book. Later on, the filmmakers demonstrate enough sense to know that they need to pay this off, so there's a quick bit where she pays off the back taxes, but it's never part of the story. It's a vestigial block of narrative, useful strictly for its mechanical function and not thought through at all.
And so it goes, pretty much throughout the whole movie. Where the Crawdads Sing generally doesn't bother getting the small stuff right, figuring that as long as it has the broad strokes of "Kya loves a nice guy, then loves a bad guy, then is tried for murdering the bad guy" in place, it doesn't matter if literally anything else works. Not that I'd say that literally nothing else works. Newman isn't an inspired director by any means, and her work with actors is a fright, but she has a nice sense for how to let the film's pacing wander out languidly while she and cinematographer Polly Morgan aim their camera around the Louisiana locations. The film opens by letting us know that it's at least as much about lovingly capturing nature footage as worrying about its story (and why not - "where the crawdads sing" is used in dialogue as a shorthand for "deep in the swamp it is peaceful and safe, because it is free of the cruel vanities of man"), and while the digital cameras used put too much sharpness into the hazy setting, it mostly achieves this, mostly. The opening sequence is simultaneously a triumph and an embarrassment, the camera floating around the air above the swamp in a lovely portrayal of the kind of world that Kya so treasures and considers the backbone of her identity, while following the flight of an insanely shitty-looking CGI heron. Again, the film doesn't bother getting the small stuff right.
And some of the small stuff is bigger than one CGI heron. For a woman who has lived her entire life in the swamp, Kya is impossible: immaculately clean, with styled hair and clothes that have a kind of "homespun chic" vibe that doesn't disguise how perfect they look. Given that the entire drama hinges on Kya feeling like a creature of the wild jarringly attempting to enter self-styled civilisation, this is a rather substantial problem, and it's not lessened by Edgar-Jones frankly terrible performance. She's not alone - Strathairn is the only cast member who isn't mostly a liability, though I'll allow that Smith is a better "warm-hearted hunk" than Dickinson is a "lousy asshole hunk" - but she's so much the focal point of everything the film is up to that the unabashed shallowness of her performance is deadly like very little else in Where the Crawdads Sing. She never feels poor, never feels illiterate, never feels like a budding naturalist captivated by the pristine world around her, never feels like her need to connect to other humans is so profound that it drives all the events of the film. She never even manages to feel like it's the 1960s. She's just giving a shallow portrayal of a soft-spoken thoughtful young lady, a perfect fit to a movie that's pretty much only shallow about everything; a functional exercise in getting the plot put over without caring if it has been done well, or if the characters involved have any distinction or depth.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*In related news, I am gobsmacked by how few copies a book has to move to become one of the bestselling novels of the last hundred years.
Put simply, this is structured as a murder mystery and courtroom drama, with the massive bulk of the story taken up in flashbacks. On 30 October, 1969, a body is found; despite a virtually complete absence of evidence, the only suspect is Kya, partially because of substantial (and accurate) rumors that she was romantically involved with the deceased, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), partially because everybody in the town of Barkley Cove, North Carolina thinks that she's a dangerous lunatic, having lived her entirely live in the wild marshlands on the Atlantic coast, and having lived quite alone since the time she was 8 or 9 years old. So she goes on trial, with one of the few locals who likes her, Tom Milton (David Strathairn) representing her as defense attorney.
And while this goes on in the framework, Where the Crawdads Sing travels back in time, showing us how Kya got to this point in three extended time periods. First is 1953, when as a small child, Kya (Jojo Regina) lived with her mother and three siblings in fear of her abusive, alcoholic father (Garret Dillahunt). Over some period of time (despite using specific years as onscreen titles, the film seems to be very indifferent to how much time is passing on a sequence-by-sequence level), all of her family members flee his wrath, until it's just Kya left; she figures out how to survive his ire, but that doesn't keep him from leaving one day as well, and so Kya is all by herself in a rural shack, learning how to raise money by harvesting mussels and selling them to a local couple of shopkeepers who are some of the only other people who like her, Mabel (Michael Hyatt) and Jumpin' (Sterling Macer, Jr.). In1962, the now-teenage Kya falls in love with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), the last person in town who likes her, and he encourages her to turn her various notes and drawings of the various natural elements around the marsh - shells, insects, birds - into a book. But then he mysteriously disappears, and we finally end up in 1968, where Chase forces himself into Kya's life, and is very obviously Bad News. Even she realises he's Bad News, but it's better, at that point, than being alone for a 16th consecutive year.
Laying it out in a paragraph like that undersells how... blobby the story structure is here. There's virtually no ongoing logic for when we jump back in time to Kya's past; the flashback moments don't really "speak to" the present moments, except in some broad sense of illustrating how much of an outsider she has been her whole life. And the three chunks of time that make up those flashbacks feel very disconnected from each other, presenting a summary of a life rather than the life itself. The gap between Tate's disappearance and Chase's arrival, in particular, is just a strange, strange ellipsis, assuming that at least a few years of Kya's life were basically just hanging out in the swamp, chilling.
But you can see the logic, even so: the childhood flashback is exposition, the adolescent flashback is first love, the 20something flashback builds on first love and catches us back up to the first scene. It's inelegant and not terribly satisfying, but it basically works. The bigger issues come at a smaller scale, where some combination of Owens's source novel and Alibar's adaptation of it keeps smacking into these little random cast-off scenelets that don't, like, do anything. E.g. we're introduced to Tom when he wanders into a bar where people are gossiping about Chase's death (that's one of the bigger issues here: the opening is a sluggish bit of scene-setting about the murder while the film as a whole is about Kya's life. That could work in a novel, with a more expansive canvas to work with, but it makes the film feel like it doesn't know how to get off the runway), and he says something to effect of "ever since I retired, I haven't had to care about that kind of thing." And then we see him for the second time when he walks into Kya's cell, as her lawyer. So... when did he unretire? That feels like a pretty big plot point. Later on, Kya's legal right to live in her old family shack is called into question, as is her legal right to sell it for a ton of money, and this terrible new conflict lasts for one whole scene; its solitary function is to motivate her to pursue publishing her book. Later on, the filmmakers demonstrate enough sense to know that they need to pay this off, so there's a quick bit where she pays off the back taxes, but it's never part of the story. It's a vestigial block of narrative, useful strictly for its mechanical function and not thought through at all.
And so it goes, pretty much throughout the whole movie. Where the Crawdads Sing generally doesn't bother getting the small stuff right, figuring that as long as it has the broad strokes of "Kya loves a nice guy, then loves a bad guy, then is tried for murdering the bad guy" in place, it doesn't matter if literally anything else works. Not that I'd say that literally nothing else works. Newman isn't an inspired director by any means, and her work with actors is a fright, but she has a nice sense for how to let the film's pacing wander out languidly while she and cinematographer Polly Morgan aim their camera around the Louisiana locations. The film opens by letting us know that it's at least as much about lovingly capturing nature footage as worrying about its story (and why not - "where the crawdads sing" is used in dialogue as a shorthand for "deep in the swamp it is peaceful and safe, because it is free of the cruel vanities of man"), and while the digital cameras used put too much sharpness into the hazy setting, it mostly achieves this, mostly. The opening sequence is simultaneously a triumph and an embarrassment, the camera floating around the air above the swamp in a lovely portrayal of the kind of world that Kya so treasures and considers the backbone of her identity, while following the flight of an insanely shitty-looking CGI heron. Again, the film doesn't bother getting the small stuff right.
And some of the small stuff is bigger than one CGI heron. For a woman who has lived her entire life in the swamp, Kya is impossible: immaculately clean, with styled hair and clothes that have a kind of "homespun chic" vibe that doesn't disguise how perfect they look. Given that the entire drama hinges on Kya feeling like a creature of the wild jarringly attempting to enter self-styled civilisation, this is a rather substantial problem, and it's not lessened by Edgar-Jones frankly terrible performance. She's not alone - Strathairn is the only cast member who isn't mostly a liability, though I'll allow that Smith is a better "warm-hearted hunk" than Dickinson is a "lousy asshole hunk" - but she's so much the focal point of everything the film is up to that the unabashed shallowness of her performance is deadly like very little else in Where the Crawdads Sing. She never feels poor, never feels illiterate, never feels like a budding naturalist captivated by the pristine world around her, never feels like her need to connect to other humans is so profound that it drives all the events of the film. She never even manages to feel like it's the 1960s. She's just giving a shallow portrayal of a soft-spoken thoughtful young lady, a perfect fit to a movie that's pretty much only shallow about everything; a functional exercise in getting the plot put over without caring if it has been done well, or if the characters involved have any distinction or depth.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*In related news, I am gobsmacked by how few copies a book has to move to become one of the bestselling novels of the last hundred years.
Categories: love stories, mysteries, summer movies, thrillers
