Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
In the North Carolina wetlands, a young woman struggles to survive
A lonely Kya rises above her harsh beginnings in the swirling Carolina marshlands
Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)
From this movie’s opening shots, it’s easy to guess that the story, adapted from the bestselling novel by Delia Owens, will draw its power from its people’s rural roots and their remote North Carolina coastal town, Barkley Cove.
I haven’t read the novel, but the movie’s beautiful, hypnotic marshland feels mesmeric, primed to ensnare, never pretty for pretty’s sake. Polly Morgan’s pearly, sun-pierced cinematography is the movie’s signal achievement, and Allen Edward Bell’s responsive editing skillfully shores up Morgan, who’s a gifted impressionist, joyfully at ease in nature.
But as the actors portraying Southern rural residents begin to speak, their words ring as vaguely backcountry, but don’t seem to come from people who are actually isolated, forlorn, discounted. There’s no Faulknerian sense of a people’s longing, however vainly, to be seen aright. And there’s no hint of Tennessee Williams’ cry of the heart, that unrequited longing to be heard. No traces of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers or Eudora Welty are to be found.
But one exception may be the protagonist, Kya, always clambering just above the mysteries she’s entangled in. Kya is abused as a teenager by her drunken, violent father and often ill-used as a struggling young woman. She’s played by the magnetic Daisy Edgar-Jones.
If you saw Jones’ astonishing work in the 2020 series Normal People or, earlier this year, in the faith-driven series Under the Banner of Heaven, you’ll have no trouble imagining she’s on the brink of a major acting career. Her work here confirms those prospects. Emotions play across Jones’ face like diamonds on green velvet. You can’t miss what she’s feeling.
But Jones’ fine work as the ostracized “Marsh Girl” the townspeople have shunned all her life can’t shine enough light on Kya’s torturous journey. The direction, by Olivia Newman, and the screenplay, by Lucy Alibar, both feel as if they’re tracking a source, like a hunter following footprints, not discovering a pathway that’s suddenly opening up before them.
The tale as they tell it is puzzling without being altogether startling. Does this lush landscape shelter or mislead those who live in it, nurture or betray them?
These questions seem to form the movie’s controlling notion, as well give us reasons to hang in there with Kya to see if the woman and the landscape that’s so confounded her can square up with one another. Can a physical and emotional morass become a place she can safely call home?
That’s not a bad grounding for a story. If only Kya faced a more convincing set of opponents, people who didn’t cut and run or lash out or warmly embrace her simply to reveal that Kya is stronger than she imagines. We need to sense how she and her neighbors, friend and foe alike, are all of a piece, a community. That would make her hurtful isolation actually moving.
But Kya’s fraught passage is pushed along by motiveless bad guys, weak boy/men and, mercy not being unknown in the wetlands, kindly strangers. It takes a village, but what makes Kya a heroine? We’re rooting for her against exactly, what?
Well, her upbringing certainly has been tough. She’s been raised in a run-down weathered house with her brutal, alcoholic father, catatonically fearful mother, and siblings who one by one abandon the sad household, leaving Kya alone to outwit her father until he disappears and, barely into her teens, to carry on alone.
Kya’s progress is gradual, since she’s almost totally isolated throughout her growing up, but there’s help along the way. A kindly black couple, Jumpin’ and Mabel (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt), take a near-parental interest, and their country store becomes a waystation where Kya is listened to, taught to add up numbers, and measured for that strangest of items, a pair of shoes.
Tate (Taylor John Smith) and Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) form a cryptic bond
In her late teens, Kya meets gentle Tate (Taylor John Smith), who patiently teaches her to read, and is the first to notice that she has artistic talent. He helps her realize that her meticulous colored drawings of the birds, flowers, shells and insects she’s carefully observed are delicately, accurately wrought.
He lights the spark that inspires Kya to reach out to the world on her own terms. Hey, girl, you could turn these drawings into a book a publisher would buy!
Inexplicably, despite their deep fondness for one another, Tate, like her family before, abandons Kya. Still more upheaval arrives when she’s taken up, and coldly seduced, by Chase (Harris Dickinson), a townie who claims to feel affection for her but is ashamed to be seen with her on Barkley Cove’s streets. He turns violent, and after one of his assaults, a townsperson overhears Kya vowing to “kill” him.
Wouldn’t you know it, shortly Chase appears to have been murdered, and Kya becomes the prime suspect. Another kindly stranger appears. He’s Tom Milton, a lawyer from the region who’d first noticed Kya’s pluck when she was a child. Tom has no trouble believing that Kya’s outsider status has gotten her wrongly accused of murder.
Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is defended by savvy country lawyer Tom (David Strathairn)
Played with his usual grace and understatement by David Strathairn, the soft spoken, big-hearted country lawyer Tom is so unassuming he’d make Atticus Finch blush. Gallant defender that he is, even forbearing, sympathetic Tom can’t discover what rules his haunted young client.
Kya’s talent for drawing feels like the one truly inspired element in this story. She’s not unlike a Zora Neale Hurston or a Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, country-bred writers who made words their weapon of choice to win respect. Both women hailed from rural Florida and proudly lived in regions known as swamps, and both depicted the traditions of “plain folk” sustained by shy manners and patiently handed-down rituals.
But this movie and, I presume, Owens’ novel, has nothing like cultural persistence in mind, a will to make the world see who you are and not judge you because of where you come from. Ostensibly that’s Kya’s struggle. But it needed more daring to get to the heart of the matter.
It’s credible that kind strangers empathize with and help Kya. But we want to hear Kya not just protest when she’s wronged, but howl. In drama, it’s not enough for pain to be witnessed. It needs to be raged against, or we sadly watch it stifle the spirit, and too often that seems to happen here.
To counter such brutal unfairness, we’re told, crawdads sing. When Kya was still a young girl, her last departing sibling advised her that when she felt most despondent, she should go where the crawdads sing. I never understood how that early nugget of lore helped empower her. What does the crawdads’ music say to Kya, and how does it work to heal her? At movie’s end, ears alert, we’re left still listening.
Another great review Ivan!