American Honey

A young girl, named Star, with no economic abilities, bears the heavy responsibility of raising her two younger siblings.

Hungry after living the life of a teenager she gets attracted to a group of young people at a supermarket with high spirit and a bad attitude. She leaves her siblings behind and joins the group who lives from day to day selling magazines to whomever they meet. The common denominator is the selling of magazines. How to do it? How to manipulate the potential buyer with different kind of stories up the sleeve that is supposed to impose sympathy? As Oliver Twist is lured into Fagins lair and is taught to pick pockets without knowing what he is doing so is Star initially. At the point where she understands the rules and laws of the group, she is involved in such a way that she accepts the game and takes some very big risks and further compromises her own moral values.

The force of the movie is the depiction of the life on the road, the interaction between our marginalized young people and slowly getting to know our protagonist, who in the beginning is the silent observer and little by little starts to unfold her personality.

I can see that the movie is being criticized for being very long and not having a story that develops from a start- to an endpoint. I agree that some of the scenes are prolonged to a point that seems unnecessary. Besides this I think that this movie is a perfect example of how the truth often lies in the detail. This means that we need to dwell in some of the scenes and that the artistic challenge is to let this happen in a way that gets the audience involved.

Again I must express my deepest respect for director Andrea Arnold who has the rare ability to show a milieu in such a convincing way that it at certain points seems as if you are not watching a movie but instead a documentary but without losing the storytelling.

Regards Simon

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Andrea Arnold's "American Honey" is a bold and ambitious film filled with good performances, and for the most part I like this film, but boy does it have a ton of pitfalls. "American Honey" is repetitive, bombastic, overlong, and filled with unlikable characters, and most of the repetitiveness comes from these characters constantly listening to and singing to rap music in their white van. Sitting through 2 hours and 43 minutes of this film felt more like a chore than a cinematic experience. I'm looking forward to what Andrea Arnold has in store for us next, I truly am, and hopefully her next film won't be as preposterously long as this.

Greetings again from the darkness. Movies are often classified according to genre: comedy, thriller, romance, drama, etc. Writer/director Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights, 2011) pays little attention to such labels, and seems to take immense pleasure in spotlighting a segment of society that rarely gets the silver screen treatment. Rather than bring us yet another lawyer, cop, teacher or writer, Ms. Arnold demands we pay attention to a group of misfits.

Our introduction to Star (Sasha Lane) comes from inside a dumpster as she and her young siblings are diving for food behind a grocery store, and afterwards hitchhiking for a ride back home. A chance parking lot meeting with an energetic young man named Jake (Shia LeBeouf) leads Star to take some drastic actions … including joining Jake and his traveling troupe of free-spirited cohorts as they drive around the country selling magazine subscriptions and staying in cheap hotels. In between fabricated sales pitches, there is much alcohol, drugs, hip hop, and sex.

Jake is the top salesperson, but it's Krystal (Riley Keough) who supervises the group with threats, punishment and insults. She understands this is a captive audience with few options … even asking Star "Will anyone miss you?" That question is at the core of what keeps this group together. The van gang is the only community to which they belong – the closest thing to family they have. The handbook's stated purpose may be to "make money", but fundamentally, these folks just want to fit in somewhere.

Director Arnold takes a quasi-documentary approach (similar to last year's Tangerine) that delivers a realistic feel to a world most of us have little knowledge of. Seeing these scam artists bounce through suburbs and rural areas, willing to take advantage of most anyone along the way, generates both empathy and disgust. By design, it's Star with whom we most relate. She clearly has a conscience, but is as naïve to the world as she is sensitive to her own desires. A simple question (used twice) is a kick in the gut to viewers, and the dreams and hopes of these misfits are most puzzling of all.

The use of music is exceptionally well done, leaning heavily on hip-hop and Rihanna (twice). The titular Lady Antebellum song has its moment, as does Darth Vader philosophy and a few flying creatures. Though the run time is entirely too long for an indie that really doesn't follow a traditional narrative, we don't mind too much since we are watching the birth of a new star. Sasha Lane makes an incredible debut, and though the director "discovered" her on spring break in Florida, the natural talent here runs deep. I'm not sure of the market for this film, but it seems obvious Ms. Lane has a much brighter future than her character – or any of the others riding along in the van.

American Honey follows a young woman as she embarks on a road trip of sorts with a bunch of hippies as they try to swindle their lives away in hopes of living in the purest of utopias. It is an indie film through and through. Everything from the story to the look reeks of an independent production which really intrigued me from the minute American Honey started. Despite this everlasting and enthralling feeling of watching pure art in the way of the indie eye as seen through director Andrea Arnold, I can't help but shake the feeling that this film could have been more. To start off, there really isn't anything terrible or bad about the film outside of its indulging and bloated running time of close to 3 hours. The acting is great, the cinematography is amazing, the soundtrack is arguably perfect and the story (while being paper thin) is acceptable. The biggest enemy the film has is itself. The editing is probably my biggest issue with the film because it ends up damaging the story through this overbearing and extremely indulgent pacing. At times, there are moments where the film is unrelenting. You can't wait to see what happens next. Then there are other moments that move so slow that you question whether or not to get up and stretch your legs. It ends up being a very frustrating film to watch because anyone can see that there is an undeniable masterpiece underneath the running time. A timeless story of youth and innocence is lost in a barrage of fire pit songs, drug fueled rage and useless character traits that end up being lost or muddled in, what felt like, an assembly cut of the film. Despite this, Andrea Arnold has a very keen eye and a natural ability to make her characters feel real even if the film is as boring as the average person. Whether or not this is what Andrea Arnold was going for, I have no idea. Overall, American Honey is a film that will most certainly test the patience of its audience but those who are fans of Arnold's Fish Tank, or just simply fans of character studies or coming of age stories, American Honey will certainly leave you feeling satisfied.

With all the talk generated during the most recent presidential election about how out of touch one half of America is with the other, it takes a British filmmaker to give us a movie that brings the socioeconomic discrepancies between one part of America and another to light in a way that no other recent movie has.

The young drifters in this movie are amazed at Kansas City, never having seen so many tall buildings together in one place before. A conversation with an older, professional trucker reveals that a dream both characters share is seeing the ocean. One girl thinks people who make $100,000 a year are rich.

Wow, talk about a world away from where I live (Chicago) and where a salary of $100,000 makes owning a home barely affordable. For awhile, "American Honey" is a compelling glimpse into the life of those who have long since been left behind by the American dream. But the film goes on far too long and is far too monotonous to remain compelling for its entire duration. We only really get to know one person in the movie, a young woman named Star who is running from the hopelessness of her situation to.....what, exactly? She doesn't know, and that's the point of the movie. But that point is made long before the movie itself ends, and without much character development (Star's character arc is awfully short for a nearly three-hour movie), I found my attention and interest wandering in the film's final half hour or so.

Grade: B