Screen Machine

Review: Animal Kingdom

There is a great scene in Animal Kingdom that illustrates this film’s unusual ability to portray chilling danger in a suburban setting. Pope, played with dead-eyed menace by Ben Mendelsohn, is the weird son of matriarch Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody. After a tragic event, he’s on the couch, smacked out and watching the clip for Air Supply’s I’m All out of Love. The music swells through the room as he stares at the TV, his mouth dumb, chin heavy on his neck. The camera pans to his nephew and girlfriend asleep on the couch opposite. Suddenly Pope’s eyes snap to the girl, like a bored lion switching its attention. The lion picks his gazelle up, carries her to another room, drops her on the bed. Who knows what could’ve happened if her boyfriend didn’t walk in at this moment. “She’s beautiful mate”, Pope says and leaves.

The boy is Joshua ‘J’ Cody, played by James Frecheville, an awkward, mumbling adolescent and the largely passive protagonist of Animal Kingdom. He loves Nicky (Laura Wheelwright) because she’s nice to him (as he admits in a rare fit of emotion). This scene is a preamble to the events that will essentially drive J to crime.

Animal Kingdom is writer-director David Michôd’s much-anticipated Australian feature. It pursues the demise of the fictional Cody family, who are perhaps more than loosely based on crime matriarch Kath Pettingill and her ‘nest of vipers’. J moves in to his grandmother Smurf’s house after his mother dies from a heroin overdose. He’s an outsider, and it is mainly from his uncertain position that the audience glimpses the age-old, but now escalating violence between his new family and the cops.

Despite Australia’s ongoing fascination with the crime genre, this film is not just another installment of ‘bogans with guns’. The film has had glowing reports from the US and has been ridiculously touted by Variety as invoking “operatic and Greek dimensions”. But the premise of Animal Kingdom can be more aptly compared to the spirit of the recent French film, A Prophet, than The Godfather. Zora Sanders commends the former for its portrait of the inarticulate, subtly rendered survival instincts of a petty criminal, making A Prophet stand meaningfully apart from the broad excesses of mainstream representations of crime.

Through the blank canvas of J, Michôd also explores the subtle hardening of a criminal. Here, it’s certainly not the rampant individualism of the American dream. In fact, Michôd probably plays more to the class tensions of the Ned Kelly legend. The Codys discuss their criminal run-ins with a gossipy intimacy usually reserved for family adversaries or estranged friends, and Melbourne cops are as corrupt and vengeful as their criminal counterparts (as opposed to the heroic Purana task force of Underbelly). The cops-and-robbers dichotomy is not drawn in obvious strokes.

The fate of J’s identity is questioned amidst these blurred lines. Two father figures try to teach him basic life skills. Early on, it’s Baz (a wholesome criminal played by Joel Edgerton) who teaches J how to wash his hands after he’s been to the toilet, a basic function J has never been hassled to bother with. At the hand dryer, J says “I’m invisible, these things never see me”. To which Baz replies, “No one’s invisible, get your hands right up in there”. Later, the paternal baton is passed to a man with a creepy moustache, Detective Senior Sgt. Leckie (Guy Pearce), who also encourages J to become visible and assert his place in life when he goes into witness protection.

J is not entirely convincing in his switch from passive onlooker to cunning participant. Despite this questionable character development and the self-conscious monologues written in to broadcast the themes, Michôd’s film is a profound portrayal of extreme family dysfunction and its role in the making of a criminal. In the end, the rage of a child who has seen too much is what drives J to assert his position in the pantheon of the Animal Kingdom. He never stood a chance with a grandma like Smurf, brilliantly performed by Jacki Weaver, with her fierce denial of fault, her scary mascara-streaked blue eyes, baby doll voice and Oedipal tendency to reach up, caress and kiss all her grown boys on the lips.

The most superb thing about Animal Kingdom is the evocative use of mise-en-scène. Shabby brick suburban interiors are framed by lush jungle ferns wavering in the light just outside the window. Kitsch figurines of animals – eagles, dogs, cats – stand casually on littered table tops and shelves. Computerised jungle jingles from Nintendo games tinker in the background. I say scrap the monologues. These details provide us with all we need to know about the imminent danger felt by the Cody’s at every moment, and J’s observation early on that ‘in those days, everyone was scared’.

Maggie Scott just finished her first feature screenplay and writes eclectically about pretty much anything to do with the arts because she has a big gap in her knowledge of science.

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