Where The Crawdads Sing: Beautiful But Unfocused

I'd had this movie talked up to me by both my mom and my dad when I was in high school, but never got the chance to watch it. Well, last night, I finally saw it, and I'm sorry to open this review with a major downer, but it's simply not a very good adaptation of its source material. However, if nothing else, it introduced me to a Taylor Swift song that I can confidently say I loved. It also plays with a lot of narrative aspects that I really enjoyed. What's more, it's another addition to my growing "PG-13 movies that maybe should have been rated R" list, for what that's worth. However, none of this changes the fact that Where The Crawdads Sing, an adaptation of Delia Owens' 2018 coming-of-age novel, is not a good movie. This makes me a little bit sad to say because, strangely enough, I found myself liking it a lot, even if it couldn't muster up enough strength to earn a passing grade from me. Much like Oblivion, the last movie I reviewed on this blog, Where The Crawdads Sing acts very much like a movie that should have been way, way better than it actually was. Oftentimes, there's legitimate beauty to be found in it, the kind of beauty that makes you sit up and fully pay attention to the story that's being told. Also, the main character of the movie, Kya, is excellently portrayed by Daisy Edgar-Jones. But I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that this movie is good, even if there are some good things to be said about it, though I imagine that most people who couldn't care less about the nuts and bolts of a story will probably be satisfied. Unfortunately, the movie mostly falls apart under any kind of trained scrutiny, So now, I've brought the individual pieces to you in an attempt to explain the good, the bad, and ultimately why this movie doesn't work when, for all intents and purposes, it should have.

Set mainly in 1960s North Carolina, Where The Crawdads Sing, a 2022 adaptation of the novel of the same name, follows a marsh-dwelling girl named Kya Clark as she is charged with the murder of Chase Andrews, a boy she was close to.

For as much as is wrong with this movie, one aspect that Where The Crawdads Sing executes wonderfully is its cinematography, production design, and location usage. Its use of natural light and natural scenery is just stunning, and all throughout the movie, I consistently found myself very impressed with how it looked, with some sequences even legitimately wowing me. However, this movie is a messy story with a pretty cover, and it's a shame that it's always in such a hurry to get to its next plot point because it would have majorly benefited from being a little bit more meditative.

This movie jumps to its suspicion of Kya way too quickly and gives us no time to sit in the inciting death and take in the fact that someone, you know, died. It's a little too obsessive with some details that probably don't matter as much as the movie thinks they do, and so Crawdads often falls into this weird space where its storytelling could have been more thorough or less thorough, and either approach would have worked better than the pace the movie chose to run with.

Crawdads is also kind of disorganized, and it's probable that some re-ordering and re-balancing would have greatly served the final product. I was confused as to why the movie chose to open with the murder and then jump straight into a long-winded prologue, and I got the sense that it would have been better off the other way around, or even sans the entire somewhat-redundant prologue. It's trying to tell two different stories from two different times at once, and this approach just doesn't entirely work because we already know the ending of one of these stories.

Also, some parts of Crawdads feature heavy expositional dialogue, dialogue containing entirely new revelations trying to cop a cheap twist and change the direction of the movie in completely unfounded ways, and this annoyed me to no end. What's more, it became apparent to me that this movie was trying to cover way too much ground, and frankly, its narrative ambition dooms its pacing from the start. I found myself wondering if the scale of this story may have been better served as an HBO miniseries rather than a movie, because Where The Crawdads Sing has all the pieces of not just a good and well-told story, but rather a truly great one. The problem is that it doesn't know how to put them all together in a way that's entirely coherent.

There's some obvious raw talent to be seen here on the part of the actors, the art department, and occasionally the writers, but too much of this movie is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and plays like a first draft of a much better story. There is a last-minute, intelligently-played twist to the movie that you'll know about if you've read the book (I hadn't), and this breathes some unexpected life into the movie to let it end on a high note, but it's just not enough to save a movie that tries to do way more than it needs to, never finding time to really dig down deep into what exactly about its story truly matters.

I feel a little bit bad criticizing Where The Crawdads Sing because there's some legitimate passion and talent on the part of the filmmakers and some legitimately good things to be said about this movie. However, the filmmakers just don't know how to make all of the pieces fit, so the movie doesn't land with as much force as it was obviously hoping to. I should and will single out Daisy Edgar-Jones's excellent performance for praise because even if the narrative can never quite seem to decide what exactly it wants to do with itself, the character of Kya kept me invested throughout. There's a good movie to be found here somewhere, buried under a series of bizarre plotting choices more disorganized than my desk at college. And the problem isn't that the good movie hidden here is especially hard to find. It's because, in the hands of a more experienced writer or director, I wouldn't have even had to look.

Where The Crawdads Sing - 5/10

John 8:6-9