American Honey (2016)
Directed by Andrea Arnold
A restless teenager escapes her troubled home and joins a traveling crew of young drifters selling magazines across the American Midwest. Immersed in a world of reckless partying, risky hustles, and fleeting romances, she searches for freedom and belonging on the open road.
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38 films that influenced American Honey
What critics say influenced American Honey
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.
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.
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.
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Those who know the films Arnold made in her native Britain, including “Red Road” and “Fish Tank,” may be reminded of the lush streak of animal symbolism that has coursed through her work since her Academy Award-winning 2003 short, “Wasp.”
Partly inspired by a 2007 New York Times article about the brutal on-the-road existence of “mag crew” kids, American Honey revisits many of the themes that have haunted Arnold’s work since the days of her Oscar-winning 2003 short Wasp – social inequality, dangerous attractions, defiant spirits.
As with all of Arnold's films, the best of which arguably are her Oscar-winning 2003 short, Wasp, and her grimly beautiful 2009 feature, Fish Tank, there's not a trace of sentimentality, condescension or moralizing.
This is the first American film by Arnold, the British director who made Wasp and Red Road and Fish Tank — three brilliant films in the social-realist tradition, one of which happens to be among my favourite films of all time.
There are aesthetic flourishes, character dynamics and nature-based motifs here that date as far back as her Oscar-winning 2003 short “Wasp.”
She navigated increasingly fraught urban scenarios in her short Wasp and features Red Road and Fish Tank; she ran wild on the Moors with 2011’s radical rethink of Wuthering Heights .
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.
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.
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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.