Edgar-Jones, Strathairn bright spots in otherwise forgettable bestseller adaptation
Readers of the massive (over 12 million copies sold!) 2018 bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing have likely been eagerly anticipating the Reese Witherspoon produced adaptation of her book club phenom. To prep for the movie, I read the Delia Owens novel, and can tell you up front that the movie does indeed capture the gist of the book. Some small plot details have been eliminated or changed slightly, and longer sections have been compressed, but the book’s themes and emotional underpinnings remain intact. The novel’s readers will have an inherent interest in the film, just for the curiosity of seeing how the story and characters translate to the big screen.
But what if you haven’t read the book? Is the movie worth seeing? My answer is a middling shrug. If you have a penchant for southern period pieces, courtroom dramas, or mysteries that unspool via flashbacks and flash forwards, than you may enjoy this 1960’s North Carolina-set tale of abandoned girl who grows up on the outskirts of her gossipy, scornful community and is accused of murdering her former lover. If none of that sounds remotely interesting to you, you may want to skip the rest of this review, and, of course, the film.
The movie is not without a few strengths. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays protagonist Kya, the marshland-living outcast of the fictional North Carolina coastal Barkley Cove. Kya’s independence and self-sufficiency after being abandoned by her family bewilders her townie neighbors. In a testament to how much the British Edgar-Jones fully embodies rural southerner Kya and fleshes her out from page to screen, Edgar-Jones is almost unrecognizable here, in voice, look, and mannerisms, as the same actress who played the coolly modern Irish Marianne in 2020’s hit series Normal People. David Strathairn, as Kya’s kindly lawyer Tom Milton, is the other standout, and the courtroom scenes in which he methodically lays out Kya’s defense are the film’s best. And the child actress Jojo Regina, who plays Kya as a girl, has a bright, natural quality reminiscent of the young Abigail Breslin.
The actors who play Kya’s love interests, though, don’t bring much zest to their clearly delineated Good Guy and Bad Guy roles. Whether that’s the fault of lackluster acting or poorly written one-note roles is debatable, but neither Taylor John Smith’s golden boy Tate or Harris Dickinson’s smarmy Chase, whose death prompts the murder investigation that leads to Kya’s arrest, offer much complexity or depth beyond their hero and villain designations. And although the film’s two primary Black characters, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer, Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt), fare somewhat better in their portrayal here than in the book’s pages (their phonetically spelled out dialect was derided by critics), their characters seem to only exist in relation to the white heroine’s story.
Some of these problems may stem from the fact that although she’s working from a script by an Oscar-nominated screenwriter Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild), director Olivia Newman helms only her second feature film here, and her inexperience often shows. The picture at times feels more like a Lifetime channel movie, with gauzy, soft-focus scenes of lovers swimming in sun-dappled water or kissing in swirling fall leaves. The film’s ending, at least, is somewhat satisfying, though readers of the book will notice a minor change in exactly how it plays out.
As a final note, the Internet has been abuzz recently with the fact that Crawdads author Delia Owens and her ex-husband are still wanted for questioning in the 1995 murder of a poacher in Zambia. Whether or not this salacious bit of real-life drama intensifies or quashes your interest in the film, I think you’ll be fine either way. There’s that shrug again.
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Where the Crawdads Sing opens today at Bay Area theaters.
