Harsh survival tale 'Where the Crawdads Sing' compromised by voice-overs, inauthentic details
“Where the Crawdads Sing” - ★ ★ ½
Olivia Newman's “Where the Crawdads Sing” supplies a superb example of what happens when filmmakers try to create an excellent adaptation of a best-selling novel instead of trying to create an excellent motion picture experience based on a best-seller.
We don't just watch the story unfold, we also hear it from a freight train of literary voice-over narrations, many of them informative, many of them unnecessary, and a few of them sounding like freshman lit class epiphanies, such as “The only constant in nature is change!”
The voice-overs come from Catherine Clarke, nicknamed “Kya,” who grows up in the marshes around a tiny North Carolina town where she remains an outsider whom the snooty locals dub “the marsh girl,” as she has survived on her own as a feral child abandoned by both her abused mother and her abusive father.
“Where the Crawdads Sing” is all about survival. Emotional survival. Psychological survival. Economic survival. And the physical kind as well.
The superb British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones - who distinguished herself in the Hulu series “Normal” and “Under the Banner of Heaven” - plays Kya with quiet pluck and guarded vulnerability as a teen and young adult. (A sad, yet feisty Jojo Regina plays Kya as a little girl.)
The<plot, taking place mostly from 1953 to 1969, hinges on a classic murder mystery.
When Kya's former lover Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) winds up dead at the base of a six-story fire tower in the marsh, the sheriff immediately arrests Kya and charges her with murder.
He has no evidence. No fingerprints. No footprints. But a motive that becomes clear later in the story.
A gentle and empathetic retired local attorney named Tom Milton (David Strathairn) takes up her defense and has no problem destroying the prosecutor's case. But he understands that gossip and prejudice against local white trash can easily trump facts.
Kya has two key support people in town, the kind black couple (Sterling Macer Jr. and a subtly scene-stealing Michael Hyatt) who run the general store. They know all about living with, and outside, the local culture.
During lengthy flashbacks, we witness how a local boy from Kya's childhood, Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) re-establishes their friendship, teaches her how to read, mentors her and encourages her to publish her astonishing sketches of the everyday objects and animals she observes in the wondrous natural habitat she calls home.
They fall in love, but can Tate be the real deal?
Under Newman's deft direction, “Where the Crawdads Sing” plucks our immersive emotional strings (as does Mychael Danna's rich, vibrant score) even though some of the details don't add up as authentic.
For an illiterate, uneducated, poverty-stricken, backwoods character, Kya acts surprisingly sophisticated, and possesses both perfect teeth and accent-free diction. She only makes one grammatical error I caught. Meanwhile, her two supposedly educated boyfriends grapple with North Carolina accents and use the word “ain't.”
Tate, the son of a scrimp farmer, and Chase, an entitled high school star athlete, dress like polished male escorts on loan from a Nicholas Sparks romantic fantasy.
Of course, because this story has been filtered through Kya's memories, perhaps these details - along with Polly Morgan's stunningly beautiful shots of the marsh - have been romantically elevated, and sanitized, especially the dubiously modest sexual encounters.
Delia Owens, author of the 2018 best-seller, created her own tagline for “Where the Crawdads Sing.” She dubbed it, “A nature-immersed mystery and love story with an ending that you'll never guess, and never, ever forget.”
That might just do it.
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, David Strathairn
Directed by: Olivia Newman
Other: A Sony Pictures release in theaters. Rated PG-13. 125 minutes