American Honey film review 5American Honey film review Matthew Robinson

Star (Sasha Lane) is seduced into abandoning her life by
Shia LaBeouf and a Rihanna song. That might not sound like a particularly
seductive combination, but she has a life that needs abandoning: the
eighteen-year-old Texan spends her days picking leftovers out of supermarket
bins. When she has a flirtatious meeting with LaBeouf’s Jake to the strains of
‘We Found Love’, his invitation to split for Kansas is all the excuse she needs
to pack a bag.

Jake is part of a ‘mag crew’, a gang of late adolescents who
sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Crossing America in a fug of pot
smoke and BO, they spend their days wheedling cheques out of strangers and
their nights getting trashed in bleak motels. It’s a set-up that allows English
director Andrea Arnold to depict America in her own brilliant way.

Arnold is the star of American
Honey. That’s not to discredit the cast: the mostly first-time actors (Lane
included) convey all the authenticity that’s required of them, and LaBeouf
finally puts in the charismatic and credible performance that he’s been
threatening for a while. But the film’s most memorable aspect is its sublime
direction.

It makes American
Honey not just a great film but a great cinematic experience. Arnold’s camera
wobbles around taking in the all the sensory information of Star’s world, all
the texture and detail, and it makes the film feel almost unbearably real even
at its most romantic moments.

It also engineers empathy for its protagonist. Star isn’t
articulate, and she’s not even especially likeable, but we see the world so totally through her eyes that it’s impossible not to appreciate her conception
of America as a smorgasbord of opportunities.

At 163 minutes, the story eventually begins to drag. There
are perhaps too many inconsequential incidents, too many ‘raw’ sex scenes, too
many Rihanna songs. It ends up recalling The
Revenant,another mix of gorgeous and gruelling.

All this means is that American
Honey is too much of a good thing. In comparison, most other films seem
confined by staginess, by directors either hitting the beats or missing them, but always tapping to the same old
rhythms. American Honey’s apparent
shapelessness is part-and-parcel with its naturalism; it’s the price of
achieving such an organic unfolding of character and ideas.

Like life, American
Honey is mostly just one thing after another. The trick – Arnold’s trick –
is knowing where to look. See American
Honey on the big screen to give the mundane its beautiful due.