SONG OF THE SOUTH

I have been mostly successful as a moviegoer to avoid reading books that are then turned into movies. And I can say the same about the best-seller “I Know Where the Crawdads Sing.” Having heard it’s a murder mystery, I didn’t want to go into the theater with full knowledge of the outcome, so I avoided the book altogether and any discussions about the plot.

The story of the title takes place in the 1950s and 1960s, in the deeply-held marshes of North Carolina, heavy with Spanish moss dripping from every tree limb and gators patrolling the murky waters like lethal submarines.

Early on we meet young Kya and her dysfunctional family, headed by an abusive drunk of a father played with appropriate menace by Garret Dillahunt. He’s not just a wife beater; he’ll strike out at anything on two legs and that forces Kya’s mother and siblings to run. Little Kya, though, remains and learns to harvest mussels at the shore to provide for herself and her father until he, too, abandons the girl.

So, Kya learns to fend for herself, with the generous looking-after from the colored couple who run the local general store. In time, Kya shows real promise as a naturalist and artist, twin pursuits that occupy her days but that earn her the nickname of “Marsh Girl.”

Even as a grown woman, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, she has a feral quality that keeps others at arm’s length. But then she meets Tate, who treats her gently and with an understanding that might seem a bit progressive for the time.

Their relationship is, for the most part, chaste in the way we have come to expect from Hallmark movies. And it appears they will become a couple. Though Tate is soon off to college with a solemn promise to return, a return we know is likely not in the cards. After all, how do you keep them down in the swamp after they’ve seen Chapel Hill?

“Crawdads” is also a murder mystery, with the victim a rich, playboy-type named Chase, who pursues Kya after her break-up with Tate. He’s found at the bottom of a fire tower and naturally the townspeople point at the Marsh Girl as the likely suspect.

A retired attorney played by David Strathairn takes Kya’s case out of a sense of obligation because he had known her as the poor, barefoot child he often spotted wandering the streets alone in Barkley Cove.

In better times, Kya had given Chase a necklace made from a shell she had found at the beach. And he was never seen without it until the night his crumpled body was found in the mud at the foot of that tower.

Chase’s mother accuses Kya in court of having ripped the necklace from her dead son’s neck. Because, well, who else could have done that?

So many questions and we get nothing but silence from Edgar-Jones. Yet her dark eyes speak volumes and maybe that’s all to the good.

Strathairn is fine as the patient and almost paternalistic attorney. His low-key demeanor reminded me of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” But it’s Edgar-Jones who deserves the accolades for her turn as a riveting force of nature.

Crawdads don’t sing, but she does. Hers is a tune made of marsh grass and fireflies and the soaring silhouettes of cranes.