Animal Kingdom
David Michod (2010)
Animal Kingdom is well made and acted but not that interesting. (This may mean it’s not as interesting as a second viewing of Never Let Me Go immediately beforehand, which left me drained – but that’s not the whole story.) Josh Cody’s mother dies of a heroin overdose. He calls the emergency services but doesn’t know what to do next. He phones to ask the advice of his maternal grandmother. Janine; she was estranged from her only daughter but she sounds pleased to hear from Josh and invites him to go and stay with her family – a family of professional criminals. Josh is a (big) seventeen-year-old, barely out of high school in Melbourne. Janine’s three sons, his uncles, are Andrew (nicknamed ‘Pope’), Craig and Darren – their specialities are armed robbery and drug-dealing. There can only be two ways this set-up can go: either the innocent Josh will be infected by the power of family and emerge a hardened criminal; or he’ll surprise the kin who think he’ll be a soft touch by resisting and/or avenging their tyranny. In fact there’s a third way, which sees Josh do both and which the writer-director David Michod (whose first feature this is) eventually takes, in an effective conclusion. But there are few surprises along the way. As a title, Animal Kingdom is somehow impressive yet it gives too much away: most of the movie feels like a demonstration of the view of human life – or a particular kind of human life – that its title already indicates. This refers not just to the lifestyle of the Codys; we note, for example, that the police hunt in packs.
The prevailing mood is laboriously grim – thanks in no small part to the relentlessly ominous score (by Antony Partos) and the visuals (the DoP is Adam Arkapaw). This is probably David Michod’s intention but the film doesn’t have a lot of texture; you never get much sense of the Codys’ world sharing the same space with or subverting a law-abiding one – the darkness at the heart of the material pollutes the whole atmosphere, even in the kitchen of the ‘respectable’ family of Josh’s ill-fated girlfriend, Nicky. Barry ‘Baz’ Brown, Uncle Pope’s partner in crime, is shot dead by the police; Craig, trying to escape from them, suffers the same fate; Pope gives Nicky a fatal heroin injection. By this point, the film is on the verge of then-there-was-none territory. Animal Kingdom has a number of similarities to The Fighter: it hovers on the edge of black comedy and it has at its centre a compelling matriarch. The Codys may be psychopathic thugs but they’re emotionally flaky too: Darren, in particular, seems on the edge of a nervous breakdown. You get the sense that they’re all screwed-up mother’s boys.
Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody is a well-written part and Jacki Weaver, who plays Janine, is by some way the strongest presence in the film – she’s also the only character who, although she’s nearly a comic grotesque, has a range of moods. It’s Janine who seems the real psycho in Animal Kingdom, with her absolute, unthinking allegiance to the brutal sons she continues to infantilise in ways that go deeper than her appending ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ to everything she says to them. A law-breaking life in the outside world and loyal, loving women indoors are a familiar enough dichotomy in crime melodramas; here, the homicidal tendencies of the Codys seem part of the air they breathe at home, and Janine doesn’t just breathe it along with them – it seems almost to emanate from her, even when she’s cooking and small-talking to a neighbour about the reprehensibly bad teeth of a new television show host. With her vicious smiliness and her implacable blue-eyed stare, Jacki Weaver occasionally brings to mind an earthier, less glam, much more dangerous version of Barbara Windsor. The hard-bitten, seen-it-all Janine also has a rather shocking baby-doll quality (in one scene she seems to be wearing a baby-doll length costume). Like the Melissa Leo character in The Fighter, she looks to be keeping herself young for her Oedipal sons (there’s no sign of their father) but Weaver’s acting has more depth than Leo’s.
One of the best things about the debutant James Frecheville’s portrait of Josh is that, although his situation is often vulnerable, he’s never as close to or as dominated by Janine as her sons are (and she knows it). Frecheville starts uncertainly: in the opening scene, Josh, seated next to his mother’s corpse, is watching television and mildly irritated that the paramedics’ arrival interrupts this. Frecheville shows Josh’s attention returning repeatedly from what’s going on in the room to what’s happening on the TV screen but this doesn’t happen naturally enough. A little later, he has a sequence in which he concentrates so much on a bit of business – flicking at some metal bottle tops with his fingernail – that nothing else comes through. Just as Josh gains in confidence with his uncles, however, Frecheville gets stronger as the film goes on. Guy Pearce is again impressive, as the decent, humourlessly competent Nathan Leckie, the cop trying to bring the Codys to book; he’s credibly ambiguous in his scenes with Josh, who is crucial to incriminating his family but whom Leckie also seems genuinely to want to protect from them. The Cody boys are played by Ben Mendelsohn (Pope), Sullivan Stapleton (Craig) and Luke Ford (Darren) but it’s Joel Edgerton, as Baz, who makes the strongest impression after Weaver and Pearce.
26 February 2011