Oh, the irony that a character tells the young protagonist near the end that she's cohesive, because cohesion's exactly what's missing here. The limited perspective of a child combined with the myopic view of the Bathtub dwellers here helps to create a mythic scale, to be sure, but whenever things brush up against the real world (not just in the FEMA bits, but also during the moments where our concern due to neglect of the children overrides our fantasy) the shallowness of this vision becomes obvious. Everyone wants there to be more great, regional, independent American cinema and while this might be a step in the right direction, it is too clunky and unformed to sell itself completely.