The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
When I saw the trailer for Where the Crawdads Sing, I thought it looked like a highbrow version of the 1974 exploitation revenge flick Gator Bait. Unfortunately, not quite. While this movie’s plot does revolve around a reclusive swamp woman being accused of murder, she does not go on a bloody rampage. Instead of good, old-fashioned 1970s revenge, we get a dry courtroom drama as a framing device for a love triangle. So, it’s less like Gator Bait and more like a slightly darker Hallmark movie. And not a Hallmark Christmas movie, either, because if you want to have a magical evening, you call me and we’ll marathon those things. We’ll park our asses on the couch and I’ll root for the small-town pastry chef to win over the big-city lawyer through the power of the holidays every fucking time. No, rather, this amounts to little more than a well-made, non-Christmas Hallmark movie.
Where the Crawdads Sing is set in North Carolina, although it was very obviously filmed in Louisiana, and tells the story of Kya. Kya’s lives deep in the marshes with her alcoholic father, whose abuse has gradually caused her mother and older siblings to flee and abandon her. Eventually, the father also disappears, leaving Kya alone to fend for herself in the marshes. She eventually meets a couple of boys, one of whom is eventually dies from falling out of a tower and she is arrested for the presumed murder. Did she do it? Will she end up with the nice boy? Who gives a shit? You will be pondering at least one of those questions for the duration of the running time.
This is based on a best-selling novel that is presumably more interesting than this adaptation, as Where the Crawdads Sing is one of the most generic and corny romance films ever to not be based on something by Nicholas Sparks. We have the drunk dad trope that was just done to much better effect in The Black Phone (seriously, go see The Black Phone). We have the love triangle with (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the nice guy and the guy that treats her like shit, a tale that’s actually older than time. God was sick of that narrative by the time the Big Bang happened. Then we have the murder trial with the good-hearted Southern lawyer when Kya is accused because she’s the weird outsider (and arrested without a shred of evidence; honestly, I have no idea how this went to trial). She starts writing books about the local wildlife and gets them published more quickly than any other author in history. There is not a single plot element in this movie that hasn’t been done to death. Check Hallmark or Lifetime right now and you will probably see at least one of these things.
The most distracting cliché, though, is the old “pretend that the hot girl isn’t hot because the plot says so” nonsense. Modeling agencies need to start sending scouts deep into swamps and marshes if Kya is any indication. Despite the film repeatedly telling us that she is a wild, feral marsh girl, she is pretty damn gorgeous and usually looks like she just spent a day at the spa. She’s also incredibly articulate and literate for somebody that only ever spent one day in school. If any of you guys are having trouble finding a lady, just walk your ass deep into a marsh because there will be a beautiful girl with a lucrative book contract hanging around somewhere.
Despite the lame cliches and plot holes that could consume an aircraft carrier (the resolution to the mystery is something that the movie literally spends the entire third act outlining as an impossibility), the performances keep this from being complete dreck. Despite being terribly miscast, Daisy Edgar-Jones does her damndest to make Kya an endearing character and she largely succeeds despite the script’s best efforts to sabotage her efforts. The real revelation, though, is child actress Jojo Regina as the young Kya. The childhood sections are the strongest parts of the film, largely because Regina really makes you feel the plight of this young girl that has been abandoned by everyone that she knows and left in the wild. These are the only scenes that generate any true interest or suspense and it is a shame that it is a setup for so little. Between the work of these two actresses, Kya becomes a sympathetic, three-dimensional character that should be featured in a more interesting story.
As you may know, this kind of movie isn’t exactly my cup of tea. However, I can still appreciate it if it is done well and this film does little but trot out the oldest of cliches and act like we should somehow be on the edge of our seats. Despite a couple of excellent performances, there is little to elevate Where the Crawdads Sing above a typical Lifetime movie of the week. And, after seeing this movie, I still have no fucking idea what a crawdad is.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Crawdads_Sing_(film)#/media/File:Where_the_Crawdads_Sing_(film).jpg
