An unusually entertaining road pic.
American Honey
Grade: B
Director: Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank)
Screenplay: Arnold
Cast: Sasha Lane (Hunting Lila), Shia LaBeouf (Fury)
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hr 43 min
by John DeSando
“We found love in a hopeless place.” Rihanna and Calvin Harris
Star (Sasha Lane) is an 18 year old American honey from Texas, wandering with a band of other teens and a couple of twenty something’s selling magazines in the Midwest to a few rich and mostly working class folks. She does find love, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), such as it is.
American Honey is an exciting, albeit episodic, road trip for this age, rootless young’uns driving by and through the poverty and unattainable wealth that polarizes them with their barely knowing it. The business rules are purely utilitarian—they’re told, for instance to hit up the poor, who will have empathy for their poverty, and the rich, who will buy from guilt over their good fortune.
The class distinctions are well defined although cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s landscapes look a bit too lush for the poverty that is so apparent. However the story is really about Star’s escape from the low-life of Oklahoma, including taking care of two kids not hers and finding abandoned frozen chicken for their meal (the first scene of her and the kids foraging for dinner is depressing).
Her new life on the road in the van with her out-there peers has a freedom about it, a freshness partly due to their being amateur actors. Yet, they usually come back to unromantic scrounging for money. When a little girl sings Dead Kennedy’s “I Kill Children” in front of her drug-dazed mother, smart director Andrea Arnold hits the right notes about poverty, this time without gloss.
That Star returns there with food for the kids says everything about the heart of this wandering teen. She is less lost than most film rebels, a girl with promise who never loses our sympathy and hope:
She grew up on a side of the road
Where the church bells ring and strong love grows
She grew up good
She grew up slow
Like American honey
Steady as a preacher
Free as a weed
Couldn't wait to get goin'
But wasn't quite ready to leave
So innocent, pure and sweet
American honey
American Honey by Lady Antebellum
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
