Released in 2018, the novel Where the Crawdads Sing (Where the crayfish sing) has so far sold more than 12 million copies. It tells of the misfortunes, the loves, the misfortunes again, then the happiness finally, of a young woman who has survived alone in the swamps of North Carolina since childhood. Reese Whiterspoon was among the first to include the work in her popular book club. It is therefore no surprise that we find her name, as producer, in the credits of the film adaptation directed by Olivia Newman. However, something seems to have been lost along the way.
The film, in spite of a neat invoice and a very well-kept overall interpretation, turns out to be surprisingly unmemorable. The story recounts, with strong flashbacks, the fate of Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones, charismatic star of the series Normal People and movie Fresh), daughter of an alcoholic bully and whose mother, then brothers and sisters, each in turn left the family cabin located in the depths of the swamps.
An attractive neighbor, Tate (Taylor John Smith, convincing), will teach him to read… and to love. Benevolent traders (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt, wonderful) will help him survive. But now the discovery of a corpse turns into a witch hunt. Recluse, Kya is obviously the obvious culprit in the eyes of the populace convinced of her own virtue, but who in fact ostracizes the young woman since childhood.
The film in this case opens with Kya’s arrest and, like the novel, Lucy Alibar’s screenplay maintains an ambiguity about the murder, which may have been committed by someone else or is not maybe, in reality, just a stupid accident.
Unfortunately, between the trial in the present and a love triangle in the past, the suspense is never there. Instead of tension, the film prefers melodrama, willingly sinning by excess of sentimentality: a propensity put on hold for two trying sequences. For the account, the film would have benefited from being less clean in its approach, for example by highlighting the dynamic between predators and prey present in the swamp, since it is after all one of the central themes of the plot.
Implausible
Circumscribed in the first part, Kya’s learning to read and her growing love for Tate constitute the best passages. Although, and this is an implausibility from the novel, it is hard to believe that the heroine not only learns to read and write so quickly, but just as quickly becomes a brilliant self-taught scientist coupled with an author and a outstanding illustrator. The treatment of racism, through the intermediary of the couple of benefactors, also seems idealized given the southern context of the 1950s and 1960s.
As for the trial interspersed with flashbackits only quality is the presence of the always excellent David Strathairn (Dolores Claiborne), moving as a defense lawyer who, like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Of silence and shadows), takes issue with the prejudices of his community.
The outcome, and we will not sell the wick, if not to specify that it is also taken as is from the novel, does not hold water. At least the film abstains from resorting to the eternal editing showing, a posteriori, what really happened. It’s a decision all the more advised that at one point, one of the characters formulates a hypothesis by putting without knowing it in the bullseye, but by specifying from the outset how improbable it is. The problem is that he is perfectly right on this point.
For the record, Delia Owens, the author of the novel, has been the subject of investigative articles from several publications, including Slate and Time. A retired zoologist, she had to leave Zambia, where she lived and worked for a long time with her ex-husband, Mark Owens, and where the authorities still want to question them in connection with an unsolved homicide case. That would make a good movie.