"You're weak beacause you're young," Detective Leckie (Guy Pearce) tells Joshua Cody, trying to get him to snitch on his family. He's right, J is the runt of the litter, just a teenager teen while his uncles are men and his grandma has been around the block. They're bank robbers and killers so there's a lot to snitch on. Sure "family is family" as they say, but that's not his main incentive to keep quiet. Fact is, in this vicious Australian noir, the stronger members of his pack won't blink twice if they need to put him down.
After J's mom dies from a heroin overdose, he calls his grandma for help. Yeah, she died and likely lived a junkie, but her household with its ready-to-be-ironed strewn laundry was Brady compared to that of her brothers and mother. There it's all stolen bank-money and sawed off shotguns. They're a family of bandits. One of his uncles does it for profit, another to support a drug habit, one nicknamed Pope does it because he's capital-F fucked-up. "When mom died," J says, "this is the world I got pulled into." At first he stays on the fringes, even inviting his girlfriend over for family meals. Eventually, he gets too close and knows too much about his family's business.
The title Animal Kingdom implies a lot. There's carnivorous violence, there's hierarchy and maybe some naturalized chaos. Lots of layers but the film relies so heavily on this motif that complexity becomes simplicity. Take the characters and their relationships with each other, for instance. Leckie is right when he calls J weak. Yet at that point, all I could think was "duh". Director Daniel Michod, for the preceding hour or so, kept piling it on and on, scene after scene emphasizing J’s runtiness. In one of the earliest scenes, J calls his grandma. He's clueless as to how to react to his mom's death. "I don't know what to do," he says while flicking cereal off the kitchen counter. "Am I supposed to plan a funeral." This is who he is for 90 percent of the movie. Barely does he grow and when he does, it's too late and too abrupt to make sense dramatically.
Compare him, as we're meant to do throughout the movie, to his uncle Pope who’s other-ed so obviously. Pope is a sociopath who nevertheless gets his family to do his bidding. He's the boss of the pack. There's a scene where he wrestles his younger brother in slow motion. They paw each other open-mouthed as if growling. Pope wins of course. And never is there any shifting of the hierarchy. Pope is the boss and his brothers listen.
The other thing that the term animal kingdom suggests is a bleakess that's a priori, natural. Now, nihilism is the most identifiable part of noir and crime drama. It sets mood, for one thing. Here, though, the nihilism goes from setting an initial mood to pushing me so far towards to incredulous that I step out of the movie-believing experience at points. It goes far, but harshly, not gracefully. It feels a bit cheap, for instance, to depict a healthy loving family (that of J’s girlfriend) and have them so abruptly destroyed by J's family.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of good stuff here, too. This is a really well-made movie with some particularly great acting. J's grandma made me think of Lucille from Arrested Development, if Lucille actually ordered murders without blinking. Guy Pearce sells me compassionate cop with not much more than a bushy mustache. And young James Frecheville (J) does his part in trying to make me believe his journey from innocent to corrupted. There's a moment when, surrounded by his girlfriend’s bathroom towels and her still opened eye-shadow, his face falls apart, tears and saliva flowing. He's a young kid doing all this in close-up, with no cuts to hide the shift.
And I loved – loved – the opening credit sequence. It's a series of bank security camera stills of a robbery. It's J's family. They're wearing done up hoodies and there are closeups of their faces. Only after a while did I notice that some of them are wearing rubber animal masks (they might even be real security photos). It took me awhile because the image is low-quality black and white and there's that jumpiness of paused analog. The masks themselves are masked. These are disorienting shots, these filmed stills. The faces look grotesque. It's too bad that the film itself wasn't this graceful. The characters faces were just too clear.
