Dwight Henry gives Wink in Beasts of the Southern Wild an affection so tangled with anger that the child beside him has to stay watchful. We rate that unsentimental performance, though the film around him sometimes makes hardship look too appealing.
Fi1m perspective
Dwight Henry makes Wink’s love for his daughter hard to take comfort in. In Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), anger keeps intruding on his affection, while Quvenzhané Wallis’s Hushpuppy watches to see how much defiance she can get away with. Henry gives that watchfulness a reason, and the two performances keep the father and child from becoming an easy example of people who grow stronger through hardship. His work is a substantial reason to see this uneven film.
This was his acting debut, made without previous training or experience, but calling it instinctive would miss the preparation. During rehearsal he improvised and put dialogue into his own words. That preparation helps explain the ease of the delivery, even when the feelings behind the words are awkward. His experience of New Orleans and hurricanes gave him something concrete to draw on in playing a father in a storm-threatened community.
Benh Zeitlin’s handling of that community is less reliable. His affection for it is infectious, but he sometimes makes poverty look more freeing than the lives on screen can justify. We were moved by the effort Hushpuppy’s toughness cost her; Wallis keeps the frightened child visible, and Henry makes her wariness understandable.
He followed Wink with supporting work as Uncle Abram in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Isaac Turner in Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (2016). His casting has tended towards fathers and authority figures in Southern or period settings. Wink remains the performance on which our view rests. We would welcome another part that asks as much of him, particularly one outside those familiar settings. Start with Beasts of the Southern Wild, with some patience for the director’s romantic streak.
Biography
Dwight Henry is an American actor and baker. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he moved to New Orleans as a child and later founded Henry's Bakery and Deli, later known as the Buttermilk Drop Bakery, in the city.
With no professional acting experience, he was cast as Wink, the father of the central character Hushpuppy, in the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild while continuing to run his bakery during production. He received a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role.
Henry subsequently appeared in 12 Years a Slave (2013) as Uncle Abram, The Birth of a Nation (2016) as Isaac Turner, and other films including Navy Seals vs. Zombies (2015) and Boo! (2018).
