American Honey

Is Andrea Arnold her generation’s greatest director of young people? It would seem so. She might not know how to end things here, but then it’s not the type of film that has you running for the door.

3106d ago

A raunchy, rapturous teenage dream, American Honey is indie cinema’s latest attempt to capture the quicksilver magic of what it means to be young and restless and radically alive on screen. And for the most part it succeeds, gorgeously — though it will probably make anyone over 30 feel either mildly outraged or wildly irrelevant.

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With Arnold’s film, we don’t get to hang on the feeling forever, but we do get to trap it like a wasp under a glass, and to examine it a moment before setting it free.

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The gorgeous, sprawling American Honey is a road trip worth taking.

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Arnold also brings to bear a euphoric appreciation for the spirit of freedom and the optimism — if not the innocence — of her subjects, who can seem at once world-weary and hopelessly naive. Call it a form of ecstatic naturalism, one that revels in the ugly paradoxes of life.

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Ultimately, “American Honey” is about motion—a van of kids speeding down the freeway. Even when they stop at a motel to break, they use the chance to dance in the parking lot.

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Teenager Star (Sasha Lane) leaves home to travel around the US with a group of hard-partying young salespeople led by Krystal (Riley Keough) and Jake (Shia LaBeouf), but must earn her place in the crew.

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The romance between Sasha Lane and Shia LaBeouf hits the movie's sweetest note.

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American Honey, long and messy as it is, is by turns observant and exuberant, and sweet in a way that is both unexpected and organic.

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Andrea Arnold's first American-set film is an experiment gone right.

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“American Honey” might have benefited from some trimming, but I admire Arnold’s resistance: Each vignette here is a key part of a young woman’s life-changing journey. To insist on telling it all feels like a feminist act, butt-numbing length be damned.

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Andrea Arnold‘s beautifully shot American picaresque overstays its welcome, then sticks around for more.

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Newcomer Sasha Lane stars alongside Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough in Andrea Arnold's first U.S. feature, about a teen runaway who takes up with a traveling youth crew.

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There’s no grand plot outline in American Honey, and at two-and-a-half-hours' running time, the film certainly rambles.

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A firmer hand with the plot – and with Shia LaBeouf – might have benefitted this admirably loose-limbed and atmospheric immersion into a little-seen world.

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In American Honey, her 162-minute fourth feature (and the first she's made in the U.S.), the British director Andrea Arnold sets an infatuation-at-first-sight encounter to Rihanna's "We Found Love," a conversation about dreams to Bruce Springsteen singing "Dream Baby Dream," and a moment of camaraderie among itinerant youngsters traveling across the American heartland to — yes — Lady Antebellum's "American Honey."

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Pushing three hours, American Honey feels every bit its length, often luxuriating in extended scenes inside the van, pot smoke swirling and hip-hop thumping. Like most of the film, these scenes are vividly rendered but increasingly repetitive and aimless.

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This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are difficult both to deny and to prove exist as depicted.

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Arnold’s very strength — the mashup of grime and epiphany — is in danger of becoming a shtick. Then, there’s the length: an elasticated plot doesn’t really suit a director who is at her best in specific locations, where people get stuck like flies.

3106d ago

Redundant, far too long and stylistically misconceived, American Honey is a disappointing turn for Andrea Arnold and another bad movie from Shia LaBeouf.

3106d ago