American Honey * * *

   Having dramatised the deprived and neglected youth of England with her 2009 film Fishtank, Andrea Arnold has now  turned to  America to give them a bit of a shake up too with this, her latest effort, American Honey.

    Eighteen year old Star is having a crap time at home, looking after her younger siblings whilst her Ma and Pa get drunk and behave selfishly and uselessly.  We meet her as she is going through a supermarket dumpster looking for salvageable food.

Would you buy from this girl?

   Star gets involved with a group of young people who work for a shonky firm that teaches them how to sell a shonky product (magazine subscriptions).

   They travel around the country, going from City to City in a minibus.  Their youth is their advantage. They knock on doors, visit truck stops, visit oil fields.  They give some spiel about working their way through college etc. Truth is, most of them are high school dropouts and have no chance of getting to college. They have bullying managers not much older than themselves.  

   It’s not specified but I sense we are looking at about two or three weeks of Star’s life as she travels with this group of young people. That is pretty well the plot - Star going from incident to incident. She doesn't seem to get too close to the other youngsters but builds a special relationship with her "supervisor".
She is the centrepiece of each scene and there are no scenes without her. But it is a logically structured story that does do a full circle with a very touching scene toward the end.

  The journey of Star is disturbing.  She hates selling, she is bad at it, but either naively or wilfully she realises she can meet her cash target through the selling of something more personal than magazines.

   I’d be surprised to learn the actors were performing verbatim dialogue from the script, but I might be wrong. We have all seen the kind of film-making where you give the actors an outline then  psych the performers up to the situation and let them go for it. American Honey seems to do that a lot. And some of the scenes are quite strong because of that. Especially those involving children. The lead actress had not acted before she was recruited for this film apparently, but you wouldn't know it. In this role she is outstanding.

   American Honey is a long film and three hours is rather hard to endure when it is filmed with a  hand held camera.  Andrea Arnold seems to like this device so she can get in there with the actors - whether they’re in a vehicle, in a fight, in a motel room, or in bed.

  She also likes to staple the scenes together with imagery of anything that flies - bugs, moths and flocks of birds.  As I recall it she did the same with her previous film Fishtank.

  I do not doubt the sincerity of Arnold in making this film about youth and her desire to speak for them and to them. But unfortunately, whether she likes it or not, it's me and my peers Andrea Arnold has to turn to for an audience.

  We, who are two or three generations on, can look at these young people with their swearing and their tattoos and their smoking and promiscuity and say “Yes, a fearless portrait of today's disenfranchised youth” or something sympathetic and knowing like that.  But is it?  

   Andrea Arnold herself is a woman in her mid fifties.  She might be bang-on with this portrayal, I don’t know. I”d ask a young person directly, except there were none in the audience.  Just a bunch of oldies in an arthouse cinema - and somehow I feel that might be the situation at most of its showings.  

   And if that’s not ironic I don’t know what is.