American Honey

Pointless and terrible film that leads to nowhere. The Director of Fish Tank, was not able to capture lighting in a bottle twice. Most of the movie is spent in a van listening to rap music, the other large part is the boring romance story with a protagonist who seemed better to be a prostitute, then a door to door salesperson. Other characters are introduced but no depth is added to these characters, even though we spend a lot of time in a van with them. The movie doesnt even pay off with the Conclusion it seemingly leads too, it just ends.

**American Honey (2016)** Directed by Andrea Arnold This is Jack Kerouac for the Millennial generation, the first cohort that can't buy houses, can't find meaningful work, and stares directly into a hopeless, dystopian future with no illusions left. American Honey joins a lineage of films about economic desperation and systemic abandonment — Dogville, Requiem for a Dream, Parasite, for example. But where those films found formal inventiveness or narrative urgency, Andrea Arnold's road movie drowns in its own sprawl. I was genuinely looking forward to this, coming from the auteur who gave us Bird and Fish Tank, films that knew exactly how long they needed to be and what they were saying. American Honey is disappointing precisely because Arnold's talent is visible throughout, but buried under bloat. Sasha Lane, in her debut, did a fabulous job. She plays Star with raw authenticity, no actorly affectation, just survival and hunger and the desperate hope that maybe this van full of misfits is better than what she's leaving behind. The soundtrack is awesome, lots of fun, capturing the manic energy of kids trying to party away the void. But the film is 163 minutes long, and that's the problem. By the end of Act I, we understand the thesis: these kids use the endless party as anesthesia for millennial symptoms, the road trip as escape from a country that has nothing to offer them. Once that's established, there's no reason to dwell on it for another hour and a half. It feels like Arnold couldn't figure out how to resolve the love story between Star and Jake (Shia LaBeouf) early enough, so we're forced to watch repetitive scenes of scamming, partying, and emotional yo-yoing until she finally found an ending. The magazine crew itself is exploitation, a scam targeting both the kids selling and the people buying, and Arnold captures that vividly. But a film about exploitation shouldn't exploit the audience's patience. What could have been a tight, devastating 100-minute portrait becomes an endurance test. By the time the resolution arrives, I stopped caring.