Review: Where The Crawdads Sing

Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" arrives with a reasonable amount of expectation attached to it. Based on a bestselling debut novel by a 70-year-old woman - who has been the topic of unusual news stories - and noted as a Reese Witherspoon book club selection, while also drawing Taylor Swift to sing the theme song, the picture has a particularly high profile.

But while the film occasionally teeters into melodramatic territory - including a courtroom drama that takes place throughout the film as the rest is set in flashback - it's a reasonably well-made adaptation of a popular book that makes up for its faults with decent storytelling, solid atmosphere and a good performance by lead Daisy Edgar-Jones.

The film begins in October 1969 in the wilds of North Carolina, where Kya (Edgar-Jones) - known to those in town as the "marsh girl" in a derogatory way - lives. She is arrested and charged in the murder of Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), a popular but smarmy and particularly nasty football player who is found dead in the swamp. 

As she awaits her trial - for which the prosecution will seek the death penalty - the film flashes back to her childhood in the marsh spent with her abusive father (Garret Dillahunt) as well as her mother and numerous siblings, all of whom eventually abandon the place, leaving Kya to her own devices. 

She survives due to her own wits and some occasional help - an early romance, Tate (Taylor John Smith) who ends up disappointing her, and a kind Black couple (Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr.). who run a local store and strike up business with Kya when she's young.

The film isn't without its problems. It portrays Kya as a free spirit who depends only on herself as she lives alone in the marsh. The townsfolk mostly mistreat her - save for the shop owners, Tate and a lawyer played by David Strathairn, who later represents her at her trial - but Kya's relationships with the film's two love interests - the genuine, but flawed, Tate and the villainous Chase - occasionally portray her as naive to a point that borders on unbelievable. It's a little hard to swallow that Kya would be mistrustful of the town's residents, but would trust an obvious operator like Chase.

Also, Mabel and Jumpin' - the Black couple who help Kya by agreeing to do business with her - often seem to exist solely to help the white lady in distress, although the two actors portraying them bring warmth and do what they can with slightly underwritten characters. 

"Where the Crawdads Sing" is several things at once - a potboiler mystery, a courtroom drama, two love stories, a Southern-fried backwoods drama and a coming of age story. It juggles most of these elements pretty well - although I could have done with a little less of the courtroom drama, though I'm pleased to say that I was incorrect in guessing the film's plot twist, and had assumed it would have reared itself in the courtroom context in a cheesy manner. Thankfully, that didn't occur. The actual plot twist will likely elicit some strong reactions, but it works better narratively than what you might guess it will be.

All in all, the film might not be a great one, but it's an enjoyable - and beautifully shot - adaptation of a popular book. The novel has drawn some controversy, but much of that has been filtered out of the movie. It may not be the awards-garnering film that its producers likely intended, but it's not half bad.