American Honey

Dir: Andrea Arnold

2016

**

I adore director Andrea Arnold, have done since she appeared on 1980s kids TV show Number 73, and her short and feature films have all been phenomenal. However, I really wasn’t that impressed with American Honey. The problem I had with it was that she had already explored a familiar theme in her 2009 hit Fish Tank. It featured a young volatile and socially isolated teenage girl looking for escapism, while looking at youth in general, poverty and growth. I loathe the term ‘coming of age’ film but I use it because it has become the label of choice for such films but I believe Arnold conquered it in 2009. Her 2006 film Red Road was a great example of Dogme cinema, she has developed the concept into her own style, and it is refreshing seeing it so brightly coloured for a change, but it doesn’t quite come together in American Honey in my opinion. It worked brilliantly in 2011’s Wuthering Heights, one of the best films of the decade, but I found her latest film to be treading old ground. It is true that no one has made a film about Mag Crews before and it isn’t an uninteresting subject, it’s just that this isn’t really what the film is about, it is about disadvantaged kids being taken advantage of. It’s middle-America, white kids singing along to gangster rap, not particularly intelligent, living for the day with very little future to look forward to. I’m not against exploring that subject, far from it, it’s just that Harmony Korine and Larry Clark have already done it, better, twenty years previous. I wonder why Arnold felt the need to go over to the USA to make such a film when there is a lot of disadvantaged kids in the UK. To be fair there are a lot of UK films that deal with counsel estate drama, indeed Arnold has been there twice already but I wonder whether there was something else she could have looked into that would have told a new story. The Mag Crew thing is controversial but if you want to make a true statement about it then it should be done through documentary. That said, most of the people in American Honey are non-actors, kids from real Mag Crews, so it is hard to understand what Arnold is getting at. If I’m being honest it is bordering on exploitation. I have no issue with realism, far from it, I think cinema needs more but this sort of realism needs some purpose. I have no problem with a director making a film in a country that is not their own either, although I would be lying if I didn’t say that the fact that American Honey beat I, Daniel Blake at the 2016 Best British Independent Film awards didn’t bother me. It’s about time she won the award, and Ken Loach has won enough times, but apart from Arnold being from Dartford, American Honey is about as British as John Wayne, Abe Lincoln’s beard and the word ‘y’all’. Newcomer Sasha Lane is very good in her film debut, Riley Keough is superb in the only role with depth and Shia LaBeouf proves once again that he is one of the finest actors working today but the rest of the cast are about as annoying as a cast can be. I don’t think the film has a good flow about it, Arnold split the script into parts and gave each actor their own lines on the day of filming to prevent planning or overacting, to give the film a more natural feel but the cast were also encouraged to improvise at the same time. The result is uneven, competitive and a bit dull. In trying to be as natural as possible the story feels the complete opposite. The mix of talented actors and non-actors is grating and didn’t work as far as I’m concerned. The imagery is sublime but for me the message was lost and confused. I found the film’s conclusion to be empty and a misguided nod towards Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. I really, really hate to say it but American Honey is style over content.