ANIMAL KINGDOM (2012)

Gangster movies have to walk a tight line. Like in all films, our protagonists must be people we can root for, people who should be able to get away with whatever they did by the end, and we, as an audience, would be okay with it. But unlike crime capers like OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the characters have to be frightening. Disney-fication of the hard edges of crime cannot be allowed and the consequences of criminality cannot be watered down or smoothed over. The solution to this quandary is usually to give us one character who will be our entry-way, either because he’s relatively non-threatening and is not a hardened criminal yet, and put him in a world which has no place for anyone who is NOT a robber, murderer, kidnapper or racketeer, and by gradually bringing us into this world, exposes the relative sanity behind the shootouts, the drugs and the self-destructiveness. It gives us family breakfasts and character singularities and bar-room confessions to humanize otherwise inscrutable psychopaths. It makes us empathize. This is what made Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola so good at this genre. They understood. They realized what made these people tick, what they were like with their wives and parents and children and friends. They knew what made them shoot a person in cold blood. And this is where so many film-makers go wrong, ruining the delicate balance of emotions that characterize any good gangster film. Why would any film-maker want to undertake such a risky genre at all? Because you get to explore the trappings of conventional legal society, the amorality of a flashy charismatic powerful set of people and because it’s so fucking delicious. And now comes another director to join the Gangster Movie Hall of Fame—David Michod. 

 

ANIMAL KINGDOM reminded me of THE DEPARTED in more ways than one—not for the plot (the two plotlines have almost nothing in common), but because of its pulsing, throbbing energy, its magnetic dizzying musical score and by its insightful analysis of guilt, loyalty and life outside the law. The film takes us into an Australian crime family, the Codys, ruled with a delicate powdered iron hand by the matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody (played with grey-eyed venom by Aussie powerhouse 

Jackie Weaver). The family consists of Smurf and her three sons—the eldest Andrew “Pope” Cody (Ben Mendelsohn, in the form of his life) is a notorious, psychopathic armed robber on the run from the police, the middle son Craig (a rightfully twitchy and believable Sullivan Stapleton) is a volatile drug dealer constantly on edge from ingesting large quantities of his own product and the youngest Darren (THE MUMMY alumnus Luke Ford) is still in his early twenties, looking up to his brothers for inspiration but frightened by the implications of their actions. Also included unofficially is Barry “Baz” Brown (Joel Edgerton in a maverick cameo), the best friend and partner-in-crime of Pope Cody. The family is tightly controlled by the deceptively effeminate Smurf Cody, who exacts long kisses from each of her sons as a gesture of obeisance, in a subliminal attempt to assert who’s boss. The whole family is living in constant fear of the loose-cannon Armed Robbery Squad, who have developed a fetish for “encounter killings” of major players in the Melbourne bank robbery scene. Into this tinderbox of a situation is thrown in Joshua “J” Cody (an intensely vulnerable performance from newcomer James Frecheville), the son of Smurf’s estranged daughter. When J’s mother dies after OD-ing on heroin, Smurf happily takes in the 17 year-old. On the other end of the spectrum is Nathan Leckie (played with the ease of a maestro by Guy Pearce), one of the few honest police officers in the Armed Robbery Squad. Throughout the film, Leckie and Smurf are locked in an intense cat-and-mouse game.

What is most frightening about this film is how in the face of such madness, J seems to think he’s living a reasonably sane life. As he says, “All this seemed strange to me and not strange either. Kids just are wherever they are and just doing whatever they’re doing, y’know?” In a situation like this, anybody can kill. A gun thrown into the hands of a seventeen year-old from a more-or-less parentless home and in the care of a crime family—how does he know not to shoot? The movie doesn’t let us be passive spectators looking on at the proceedings from a distance. We smell the blood, the shattered glass, the broken bones, the cold metal of a loaded gun. We’re constantly thrown into the shoes of J, and there is no escape from the knotty questions the film asks. This is a movie with free will—anything can (and does) happen right around the corner.

And yet David Michod is not here to judge. His lens is an objective one. Save for the terrifying 

brutality of Pope Cody, he chooses to show things as they are and let his audience decide about the good guys and the bad. He is a talent to be reckoned with, a magnificent gift to world cinema, courtesy of the Australian film industry. With vivid visual flair, virtually inexhaustible stores of empathy and a fantastic gift for finding the perfect synthesis of music and image, Michod has all the skills to make a great director. He makes sure that his viewers are always aware of the danger his characters are in, never letting the pace slacken, bringing on scene after gripping scene. Antony Partos’ moody, ominous electronic musical score accentuates every moment of the film with its seductive dark grooves. This is one of the best background scores I’ve seen in any crime movie, contributing hugely to the effectiveness of the film.

A near-flawless thriller and a masterful study of the criminal psyche from a debut director who shows oodles of promise; THIS is what Sundance is all about. A fantastic 9/10 for me.