Andrea Arnold
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Arnold, who turned in an extra visceral adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 2011, filmed American Honey in chronological order, with much of the film improvised and like Larry Clark’s Kids, it wears its nihilism on its tie-dye sleeve but it also has the beauty and power of a Terence Malick epic.
As with the 1995 film “Kids,” there’s a restless nihilism at the center of “American Honey” that fuels the film’s young antiheroes in their peripatetic rush from one nowhere to another.
In the vein of Harmony Korine’s deliberately affectless teen screenplays like Spring Breakers or Kids , American Honey leaves those questions unasked.
It’s a dose of nihilist picaresque to set beside Larry Clark’s Kids , Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Gus Van Sant’s paeans to doomed youth—and, for the first hour of its 162-minute running time, American Honey swarms the screen with vibrantly uncouth energy.
Newcomer Sasha Lane is Star, who leads the cast of mostly non-actors as the newbie in the gang, which recalls Larry Clark’s “Kids.”
At times it feels as if Arnold has remade Larry Clark’s “Kids” for a more hopeful century, or “Spring Breakers” with real people instead of carnivorous cartoons.
Almost Famous (2000)
Directed by Cameron Crowe
influenced American Honey (2016)
Music Themes Visuals
To that end, the scene in which the hobo clan collectively sings Lady Antebellum’s “American Honey” gives sentimental vibes of the “Tiny Dancer” sing-along in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous.
Sometimes American Honey even plays like a grittier version of Almost Famous.
• Lady Antebellum’s title track provides a road-trip moment reminiscent of the sing-along to “Tiny Dancer” in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous.”
Andrea Arnold’s American Honey doesn’t contain musical numbers, exactly; its interludes are more like the “Tiny Dancer” scene from Almost Famous crossed with a low-budget music video.
They also sing and dance along with whatever pop or hip-hop songs come on the van’s muffled sound system—great, if you thought Almost Famous should have consisted of nothing but “Tiny Dancer” scenes.
A penultimate sing along to the country song American Honey movie derived its title from (a song which, after 2 hours and 45 minutes of build up, reveals itself to be god awful) is a shameless retread of the Tiny Dancer sequence from Almost Famous.
But it’s not the silk of Tilda Swinton’s fabrics or the hairs in Ralph Fiennes’ beard this time around—the feels of Bones and All are grungy stuff, far more reminiscent of the work of Andrea Arnold (most especially American Honey ) than anything he’s done previously.
Maren's search for the mother she's never known, and the necessity of having to leave the scene of various crimes, drive the pair across the Midwest, in sequences that also recall recent films like Andrea Arnold's great reckless-youth elegy American Honey .
Like Call Me by Your Name , Bones and All is a sensual movie, particularly visually — Guadagnino luxuriates in the kind of big-sky-country vistas that made Andrea Arnold’s similarly summer-break-themed American Honey so memorable, and he lights his leads warmly in the day and with skulking fervor at night.
If you fell for the kind of dreamy union depicted in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, then just replace the sweet stuff with the red stuff and you’ll have an idea of what this achieves.
Shults ( Krisha , It Comes At Night ) front-loads his story with so much feverish plotting and kinetic camerawork that that reach sometimes threatens to subsume it; it’s hard not be reminded of recent (and more fully realized) indie touchstones like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey , another film that soaked itself in the visual and musical language of contemporary youth culture, or Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight , whose Florida setting held a sort of dreamlike sway over nearly every scene.
There are shades of Moonlight (2016) and American Honey (2016) throughout: Shults grasps for a feeling of reckless abandon and “head dangling out the window of a speeding car” joyfulness, but struggles to replicate any of their mutual depth.
With remnants of Moonlight, Luce, and American Honey sprinkled throughout, Trey Edward Shults pays tribute to great independent films and filmmakers while also bringing to life an unforgettable story of his own that will leave a long-lasting impact on anyone who sees it.
The Florida Project (2017)
Directed by Sean Baker
influenced by Fish Tank (2009), American Honey (2016)
Themes Characters Visuals
In some ways, The Florida Project reminded me of Fish Tank .
Influences here range from Ken Loach’s 1969 gem Kes, Carroll Ballard’s 1979 classic The Black Stallion, François Truffaut’s timeless 1959 stunner The 400 Blows, John Boorman’s graceful 1987 drama Hope and Glory and Andrea Arnold’s 2009 marvel Fish Tank.
A mix of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and “Fish Tank,” Baker (who wrote the film with Chris Bergoch) brilliantly presents both sides of Moonee’s world, the real and the imaginative, held together by a whisper-thin membrane of childhood wonder.
While the performances of Prince and Vinaite are raw (the latter reminded me of Katie Jarvis from Fish Tank in its ferocity), it's Dafoe who is the balancing influence.
There are exceptions to the rule, such as Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Lee Daniels’s Precious, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Vinaite brings a lovely naturalism to the role that’s reminiscent of Andrea Arnold’s work with discoveries like Sasha Lane (in last year’s outstanding American Honey).
Spring Breakers (2013)
Directed by Harmony Korine
influenced American Honey (2016)
Themes Characters
In the vein of Harmony Korine’s deliberately affectless teen screenplays like Spring Breakers or Kids , American Honey leaves those questions unasked.
The film evinces a kinship with the disaffected youth portraits of Gus Van Sant, like Elephant and Paranoid Park, and the darker brand of generational nihilism purveyed by Harmony Korine; its raw sexual content, wild energy and moments of reckless crime specifically recall Spring Breakers.
That’s during the day; at night, they drink and smoke and fuck and fight (the film plays, as odd a mixture as it may be, like a cross between Glengarry Glen Ross and Spring Breakers).
It’s a dose of nihilist picaresque to set beside Larry Clark’s Kids , Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Gus Van Sant’s paeans to doomed youth—and, for the first hour of its 162-minute running time, American Honey swarms the screen with vibrantly uncouth energy.
While exhilarating as sensory spectacle, “American Honey” perhaps works most satisfyingly as a femme-driven corrective to Harmony Korine’s comparable but inferior “Spring Breakers,” a notional girl-power exercise that muted its female characters’ perspective in favor of James Franco’s gonzo mentor figure.
LaBeouf, though doing fine work, seems to have been hired just so that his performance — he wears an eyebrow ring, mumble-flubs his lines, and carries himself with an air of mysterious/threatening eroticism — could piggyback on the critical cachet of the James Franco–in–Spring Breakers brand.
From the first scene of biracial, androgynous Star (Sasha Lane) dumpster-diving with her step-siblings, I immediately recalled Mary Ellen Mark’s 1985 Streetwise, another phony attack on American inequality that romanticized reckless adolescents.
There are telling echoes too of everything from American Beauty 's cracked vision of suburbia to the fever-dream intensity of more recent the-kids-are-not-alright touchstones like Waves or American Honey .
Like Shia LaBeouf in American Honey you can practically smell Moses through the screen, yet even as he steals drugs from his family he maintains his Tiger Beat cover boy sexuality, irresistible to Milla and for anyone older, the kind of kid you want to simultaneously hug and whack upside the head with rolled-up newspaper.
She’s only shaken out of her reverie when Moses (Toby Wallace), a tall, tattooed, rat-tailed young man resembling a taller version of Shia LaBeouf’s American Honey character, accidentally barrels into her.
Like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey last year, life spent drifting on the road in the States feels all the more engrossing when documented by an outsider looking across this sweeping foreign land.
Lean on Pete is, for all intents and purposes, a road picture, and I couldn’t help but think of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016) while watching it.
Like “American Honey” (2016), from another key British filmmaker, Andrea Arnold, “Lean on Pete” uses its young protagonist as a kind of search engine, looking for answers to his own fate and to the inequities at the heart of our nation.
The country that Haigh sets out to capture during Charley’s arduous expedition from Oregon to Wyoming (Laramie, incidentally) stems from the same one-dimensional vision that marred Andrea Arnold’s American Honey —that of the British outsider looking in and only recognizing America’s sheen (it’s in the tacky picture frames, the military references, and the utter lack of solidarity between people).
It’s a contemplative art film of subtle beauty, reminiscent of such indie dramas as “American Honey” and “Wendy and Lucy.”
With its quietly picturesque landscapes of working poor America and focused gaze on those struggling within its interiors, many might draw comparisons to Andrea Arnold’s festival favourite American Honey; but where fellow Briton Arnold’s knack for portraying the nuanced humanisms of precarity translates across the pond with ease, Haigh’s first U.S.-set picture falls short, stopping just shy of poverty porn.
It's also a believable teen story reminiscent of classic youth movies like River's Edge and Elephant.
It recalls Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in that, while watching, you almost want to wipe sweat off your upper lip that isn’t there.
Yet Hill’s take on coming of age is nowhere near as prurient or sinister as Korine’s, and its portrayal of carefree teen mavericks recalls something more like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey or Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen.
With other films like American Honey , A Ghost Story , and First Reformed embracing the archaic, once television-friendly frame it would appear that A24 knows something that we do not.
Juxtapose all of this with something like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey or Sean Baker’s dual whammy of Tangerine and The Florida Project , and for all its narrative passion and visual eloquence (vaunted cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt shoots things with a magnetic attention to detail that’s riveting) Mid90s almost can’t help but come up short.
The way Glazer films "Under the Skin," it's a blend of gritty neorealism in the vein of Andrea Arnold's films, particularly "Red Road," and modestly scaled, elegantly wrought fantasy.
…as with Emerald Fennell’s overstuffed Wuthering Heights, it’s a good example of a text directors are so keen to put a personal spin on that they never bother telling the actual story.
I suspect it will be one of the more divisive films of the year, much like Wuthering Heights.
Si, en American Graffiti (difícil obviar el parecido entre los títulos), George Lucas mostraba a unos jovenzuelos hechos un manojo de dudas acerca de su porvenir y del rol que deberían asumir para integrarse en la sociedad, lo que permitía llenar el relato de oráculos y momentos epifánicos, las criaturas que presenta Arnold resultan mucho más pragmáticas, limitándose a actuar en presente, sin plantearse si son aún jóvenes o ya adultos, y sin ningún hogar/lugar que abandonar o al que dirigirse.
American Graffiti was an ode to a youth lost to war and the strife of the 1960s; American Beauty seemed to mourn the loss of the traditional family; American Psycho seemed to say that with just a simple changing of perspective, we’re all just a bit crazy here.
Those so inclined might find a statement in this, something about how only the language of cliché can depict a heartland where cliché is the lingua franca, but this is pretty flimsy stuff next to, say, the satirical, psychoanalytical study of the internalization of inspirational cliché in Danny McBride’s series Eastbound & Down, and compared to recent (very different) American pastorals like Roberto Minervini’s The Other Side or Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, American Honey comes off as the work of a gawping tourist.
And like German director Wim Wenders ("Paris, Texas," "Alice in the Cities"), whose un-Americanness allowed him to see the country, and road genre, in a fresh way, Arnold's outsider status enables her to present America in ways we may overlook.
Death of a Salesman it is not.
Parts "Death of a Salesman," "On the Road," and "Bonnie and Clyde" — with a pinch of "Glengarry Glen Ross" thrown in — this film feels completely of the moment and also classic.
Lane, whom Arnold discovered lounging on a Miami beach, recalls Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, balancing an inherent toughness with the fragility of girlhood.
This is what American desperation looks like, a “Winter’s Bone” that’s gotten a grip far beyond the Ozarks.
Her one period picture - "Wuthering Heights" - made Heathcliff black, and set its story in the muddiest moors imaginable.
In both “Fish Tank” and her little-seen, boldly revisionist adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” the director’s rough-hewn style seemed almost precocious in its primitivism; all that raw austerity could feel like a bit of a put-on.
Arnold's look at this undercurrent of America was inspired by her own travels across the country — a journey that began at the Salt Lake City airport rental-car counter after her adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" screened at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Arnold comes to America after three films that explored a more native and personal form of picaresque, the byways of English passion; though even those movies — Red Road, Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights — had a flair and impetus beyond the norms of Cinema Blighty.
Arnold, who turned in an extra visceral adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 2011, filmed American Honey in chronological order, with much of the film improvised and like Larry Clark’s Kids, it wears its nihilism on its tie-dye sleeve but it also has the beauty and power of a Terence Malick epic.
Loosely inspired by a 2007 New York Times article by Ian Urbina on the subculture of roving “mag crews” — groups of teenagers and young adults, many of them runaways and dropouts, who sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door and in the streets — the scripted drama by British writer-director Andrea Arnold (“ Wuthering Heights ”) isn’t quite cinema vérité, although most of the young cast is composed of nonactors, and the style of filmmaking is certainly fly-on-the-wall — with a vengeance.