Where the Crawdads Sing

Olivia Newman’s film of Delia Owens's Southern gothic coming-of-age murder mystery, Where the Crawdads Sing, suffers from a whole lot more than just the usual problems of best-seller-to-motion-picture transitions. Lucy Alibar, the playwright who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild, crafts a frustrating screenplay that combines several hackneyed narrative formulas. Like so many popular-fiction adaptations, she condenses the first part of the novel down to the type of expository twenty-minute movie intro that the viewer must sit through while we wait for the story proper to begin. We learn about our main character by listening to her narrate the CliffsNotes of her childhood while we watch scene fragments that illustrate exactly what her voiceover explains to us. And in the case of this type of backstory, which involves domestic violence, alcoholism, child abuse, and other horrors, conveying this info in such a breezy manner keeps us at a remove from the protagonist and the events they describe. Worse, this form of abridged cinematic storytelling prevents even the best of actors from bringing any nuance or dimension to their roles, leaving us with stereotypes rather than characters we can believe in. A good film adaptation of a novel finds ways to tell us the histories of its characters while simultaneously propelling the story forward.

What we learn from the tedious setup is that a young woman named Catherine "Kya" Clark grew up dirt poor in 1950s North Carolina with a violent father who drove away her mother and siblings and eventually abandoned her as well. From the age of seven, little Kya had to fend for herself, living in a shack in the marsh, surviving off the fishing skills her father taught her, and learning to read, write, and count from a slightly older friend named Tate. Now, she stands accused of murdering the local quarterback, with whom she apparently had a sexual relationship. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kya as an adult and David Strathairn plays the kindly lawyer who takes on her case. Through flashbacks and testimony, the picture unfolds like a watered-down version of a John Grisham-style Southern courtroom drama, crossed with a Nicholas Sparks-style Southern romance, with a lot of false girl-power energy tossed in.

Where the Crawdads Sing is ostensibly about othering. The folks in the local town have ostracized Kya for as long as she can remember, calling her "Marsh Girl" and spreading gossip about her strange, feral, possibly deviant ways. But the way Newman depicts this wild child is completely at odds with that theme. Edgar-Jones looks, speaks, and behaves as if she just stepped out of a Starbucks on her way to teach a grad-level biology class. I get that the filmmakers here may be trying to court the YA crowd more than the Oprah's Book Club crowd, but come on. It wouldn't even be credible for the "normal kids" in this town to speak with the contemporary style, poise, and elocution that this forsaken backwoods waif commands. And she carries herself with such self-confidence we'd think her impervious to the taunts, whispers, and sideways glances she receives. 

Kya not only has tweezed eyebrows, shaved legs, and armpits free of any trace of stubble, her long hair is perfectly shampooed, conditioned, and combed every time we see her. There's not a speck of dirt on her freshly ironed cotton dresses, and not only is her skin free of any scratches or scrapes, but her feet aren't even dirty. Some "marsh girl!" I don't take issue with things feeling a little too polished or out-of-time in movies in general, but when the whole point of the picture is that the protagonist has been a victim of bullying and exclusion because she doesn't conform to the social norms of her society, I have to ask, why would this girl's peers view her as an outsider? The fact that she doesn't wear shoes? Or maybe it's that she reads at a college level. These seem to be the only things that set her apart.

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