American Honey
First screened in October 2016 / Most recently screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Andrea Arnold. Cast: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough, McCaul Lombardi, Raymond Coalson, Chad Cox, Veronica Ezell, Arielle Holmes, Garry Howell, Crystal Ice, Shawna Rae Moseley, Johnny Pierce II, Dakota Powers, Isaiah Stone, Kenneth Kory Tucker, Christopher David Wright, Brody Hunsaker, Chasity Hunsaker, Michael Hunsaker, Summer Hunsaker, Laura Kirk, Kaylin Mally, Will Patton, Bruce Gregory. Screenplay: Andrea Arnold. Twitter Capsule:
Watching the film leap, tumble, and find itself is even more exciting than watching Star do so. Thrilling ambition.
VOR:⑤
Further elaboration of Arnold's distinctive style, which feels both grander and looser here. Gutsy in cultural depiction and formal execution.
I'm really thrilled this movie held up as much as I'd hoped, if not more so, eight years on from my first encounter. Long movies, improv-heavy movies, youth movies, movies centering poverty, movies centering a number of first-time actors, movies about the US made by non-US directors... each of these rubrics tends to elicit a lot of huffiness from American critics and audiences, some of it well-earned, some of it less so. For American Honey to occupy all of these positions at once takes real temerity, and for it to land as well as it does requires palpable, energizing creativity at every level.
With only momentary exceptions, this is an intensely cautionary tale that almost totally abjures pure villains or moral hand-wringing. Filmmaker Andrea Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan somehow achieve the same visual precision and impeccable framing on the open road, with a freewheeling cast and amid several markedly unbeautiful locales, as they have in more controlled environments. Brushes with danger, exploitation, and brutality are all the more haunting for refusing the most egregious and predictable routes they might have traced. Individual scenes and sequences stand out as some of the most layered and unpredictable of a superb movie year: e.g., the line-dancing bar, the lotion application, the cold-call during a birthday party, the poolside mezcal, the ride with a trucker, the oil-field assignation. Some scenes are tighter and some more ragged-edged, only partly by design, and some exchanges and environments more persuasive than others, but even the passages without high peaks have no important valleys or lags.
I think Arnold achieves here her fullest-ever blend of looseness and focus as a director, instigator, and shepherd of talents in the rough; I'd probably rate Fish Tank the even greater film, but American Honey holds the higher degree of difficulty, expanding Arnold's canvas and exploring all new milieus an ocean away from what's familiar, while still retaining all the virtues of her prior work. The foregrounded performers (Lane, LaBeouf, Keough) all deliver beautifully, and the electron field of erratic young-adult personalities surrounding them lends vital color and context without just seeming chaotic.
I'm so curious what more viewers from the spaces American Honey explores and more viewers the ages of the main characters would have made of this movie. It's a shame the initial release and the whole shape of American film exhibition did almost everything possible to cleave the movie off from those exact audiences, even with a vigorous push from A24. Still, I expect this film's following may keep growing as years pass. If or when Arnold ever manages the Zone of Interest or the Uncut Gems that finally boosts her mass-cultural profile closer to the level she deserves, I expect this movie to be a welcome discovery for many, many people... and a polarizing one, too, as it has already proved, which in this case strikes me as just the outcome the filmmaker wanted and just what the story and aesthetics deserve. The movie has trouble ending, with some final shots that strain too hard for resolution and a closing music cue that makes no sense to me at all. I have other questions about plot mechanics and group behaviors that ought to have been easy to pre-empt. But sometimes a raft of queries is the sign of a rich, productively unsteadying experience, with lots to say and even more to show. Grade:A–
