Animal Kingdom

I'm loving the renaissance that is happening with Australian films at the moment. Our films have never looked crisper or more powerful. It's been a long journey through the cultural cringe-factor... Australia's waves of filmmaking have travelled through exploitation, high-brow drudgery, parody, and derivative adherance to tried-and-tested formulas. Now it feels as if the country has come full circle and can just make great films without feeling the self-conscious need to always be aware of our cultural standpoint as filmmakers. It's becoming okay to make a piece of artistically-sound cinema that also entertains... the prevelance of torrent and other filesharing technologies (and the internet in general) now means that people all over the world can have access to films that were previously restricted by their geography. This means that Australian films like The Square, The Loved Ones, Animal Kingdom, etc, can be easily watched by American or British film fans when they read a recommendation for such films on websites like aintitcoolnews.com. As much as Australia bemoans the rise of piracy as a nail in it's film industry's coffin, I think it actually helps amplify word-of-mouth as a force for getting the attention of critics and distributors, and in the long run can be quite beneficial to grassroots and genre filmmaking.

Animal Kingdom is a cold, bleak operatic film noir that builds on the promise of previous Aussie crime drama The Square. It starts out by juxtaposing the reality of suburban life with the grottiness of the criminal underworld in a suitably low-key fashion, depicting the film's tight-lipped 'hero' J (James Frencheville) as he calmly calls his aunt to inform her that his mum has just died of a heroin overdose. Meanwhile, his mum lies cold and prostrate on the lounge while a gameshow plays on the telly. Soon enough, Animal Kingdon's credits roll and stirring, mournful music swells over screenshots of armed robbers captured on CCTV footage. This pretty much sums up the film; the sublime and the seedy merging as one. It's a beautifully shot movie that examines the lowest echelons of our society - much like a documentary that seeks to objectively chronicle the predators of the animal kingdom in all their violent nature.

After the death of his mum, J goes to live with his aunt Janine (Jacki Weaver) and her sons, the Cody boys. The eldest of these sons is Pope Cody (Ben Mendelsohn), currently in hiding due to his role as ringleader in a series of armed robberies. The Codys are helped by their friend and 'colleague' Barry (Joel Edgerton), who becomes a kind of substitute father-figure to J. In J we see this family of career criminals through the eyes of a newcomer - his monotonous, unsensationalised narration serves to further highlight the documentarian aspects. Things have been getting harder for the Codys, these guys have gotten so far with what they do, defying the law of probability by staying alive and uncaptured. Barry knows their time is up - the odds are against them if they continue their lives of crime, so he's trying to break the cycle. It's not a moral choice, more a case of simple survival - the Codys are like great leopards stalked by careful hunters (the police), and if they're to survive they need to change their spots (and as the adage goes, leopards generally aren't great at that). This metaphor couldn't be any clearer than in one slow-motion scene where Pope and his younger brother wrestle playfully on the couch, pawing each other like a pair of cubs.

It can be hard adjusting to the idea of J as the protagonist... as far as heroes go he's positively non-existent, led through the film by other characters like a numb cypher. He's characterised by the apathy of youth that - in reality - sees many kids fall into lives of crime. He's directionless and without a moral compass. More importantly, he doesn't seem to have the predator instinct of his cousins, so his chances of survival aren't as strong. Guy Pearce rounds out the film as the film's counterweight - a laidback detective and family man who might just be J's salvation. His role in the film is relatively small but important, and Pearce does a good job of grounding the character with a realistic level of machismo and weariness.

The other key points in the cast are Edgerton, Weaver and Mendelsohn. Edgerton is great but also understandedly underutilised. Jacki Weaver shines as the matriarch of the family, bringing a subtle and disturbing Oedipal touch to her relationship with her sons, and coming into her own in the film's last act. Mendelsohn absolutely steals the film as Pope... there are echoes of his memorable role in the mid-90s film Idiot Box, but Pope has a bit more presence and depth. He's like a coiled snake, poised to strike and with the hooded eyes of a cobra. There's an undertone of ever-present menace to his performance that matches the film's themes... the ideas of a predator's instinct, survival, and that a life of crime is always accompanied by a fluctuating level of fear. It's Mendelsohn's performance that unexpectedly drives much of the film... the last half an hour or so plays like a strange combination of tense and relaxed. It's a realistically eerie feeling that put me on the edge of my seat. A large part of this is also down to the nongratuitous depiction of criminal violence - the acts of violence in this film are often sudden and unglamourised. The film doesn't swim with blood, but when something happens you feel it all the more due to the illusion of realism.

Animal Kingdom is definitely a must-see.

DIRECTOR: David Michod
WRITER/SOURCE: David Michod
KEY ACTORS: Ben Medelsohn, Jacki Weaver, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Luke Ford, Sullivan Stapleton, James Frencheville, Dan Wyllie

RELATED TEXTS:
- As mentioned above, there are more than a few thematic and structural similarities between this film and Joel Edgerton's crime opus The Square.
- The character of the dodgy lawyer Ezra White (played by Dan Wyllie) was previously featured in the short film Ezra White, LL. B. also directed and written by David Michod.
- The melbourne criminal underworld that forms the basis for Animal Kingdom also inspired the smash-hit Australian TV series Underbelly.
- Animal Kingdom can be viewed as the latest and most sophisticated entry in the subgenre of modern Australian crime films - a wave that can be traced back to the more humour-based Two Hands and Idiot Box. Other notable films in the genre include Gettin' Square, The Hard Word (also starring Joel Edgerton and Guy Pearce), The Combination, Cedar Boys, Noise, Dirty Deeds and Chopper.

AWARDS
Won a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film festival.