Somehow I missed American Honey when it came out in 2016, although I knew just what Andrea Arnold is capable of.
Her Wuthering Heights had only half worked but when Arnold gets inside something, she takes you right there. Inside. I left that film feeling as if I was caked in mud, exhausted and lashed wet to the bone.
The Yorkshire Moors, the Red Road Flats, Tilbury in Fish Tank – Arnold understands place on a primal level. She is often called a realist, but not by me. Yes, there is a Dogme looseness in how she shoots, but there is always a tension between the rawness she gets to and a forensic hyperreality.
American Honey has been described as overlong music video and it’s easy to see why, but that’s a pretty dumb summation. It takes some guts to move between intensity and boredom cinematically yet that is what being on the road is. And it’s different for girls.
We first meet Star scavenging for food in bins and looking after two young children. She is in a sexually abusive relationship with their father but she is never defined by that abuse. Instead, she runs away with a hokey crew of “mag kids” – young misfits who sell magazine subscriptions. Star is seduced into this life in a scene like one from a musical when Jake (Shia LaBeouf with a ratty plait) lures her in a supermarket by dancing on the checkout counter. He drops his blingy phone, perhaps deliberately. She returns it to him, like Wonka’s golden ticket, and off she goes, into another world – into the van where these kids smoke bongs and chat shit, stopping off at cheap motels along the way. Star and Jake circle each other.
The crew is run by Crystal – a superlative performance by Riley Keough of the 1,000-yard stare. She sizes up Star, who is from Texas, saying to her: “So you’re a southern girl, a real American honey like me.” Race is not mentioned but Star – the revelation that is Sasha Lane – is dual heritage. When Crystal, wearing a bikini patterned with the confederate flag, starts laying down the law as she commands Jake to rub her legs with tanning lotion, the faultlines are visible if you want to see them.
On the road, the crew get wasted and Star learns to lie and to trade. Arnold shoots up close into a claustrophobic moshpit of young flesh, almost as if we’re watching pagan rituals. You smell the skunk, the hungover breath. Inside, the stoner talk suffocates.
Outside is the tall, tall sky. Outside, when Star has sex with Jake it is she who takes control, pulling out a bloodied tampon. When she gets in a truck with three ol’ boys and starts drinking mescal we think we know what will happen, but we don’t. When she prostitutes herself it is on her own terms. Jake is merely the object of exchange between Crystal and Star. Crystal owns Jake but Star owns her own desires. Imagine that in a young woman!
Plot-wise, not a lot happens: this is movie driven by light and sound and mood. Rap, the kids affirmation to E-40’s Choices, Mazzy Star, Carnage, the Raveonettes, the music IS the action.
For this is a film about America. It came out just as Trump was elected and here is the deep poverty and bleakness, the ravages of meth and Vicodin. And the beauty and hugeness of it all. Arnold knows where she is, all right. The vista of Kansas City makes the kids oooh and aaah. Oklahoma. South Dakota. The malls. The vastness. Arnold’s own road trips all paid off. This is America shot in her 4x3 frame.
I related to the mag crew as, strangely enough, in another life in another century, I sold encyclopedias in the burbs of Baton Rouge. We had to learn a script, be driven to God knows where in a minibus, then be dumped and go door to door. Like Star, I couldn’t really do it, but I learned a lot and soon got another job. Yet I remember the homes of the people I was trying to sell to and the lies I had memorised and, yes, the kindness of strangers.
Gus Van Sant, Harmony Korine and even Terrence Malick have been invoked in relation to American Honey, but this is more Korine’s Gummo than his Spring Breakers. We sure know what happens to girls in road movies. They pay for their fun like Thelma and Louise. But the film this one made me return to was Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, which haunts me. A woman detaches herself from society and wanders through the fields and small towns of France in defiance. She ends up dead.
Arnold does something different. She gives her characters the space to break out of the confines of lives marked by poverty and abuse. She shoots so close that they expand. She shows us the US in all its complicated neglect. These kids ask each other about their dreams because no one has asked them before. The American dream does not belong to them but here, in the parts of the States over which we fly, for an instant they soar.
Star does not end up dead. She submerges herself in a lake. A baptism? Amid the fireflies. A girl who possesses herself. Fully. A rare moment of female freedom and fearlessness in the immensity of the American sublime. Yes.
