ANIMAL KINGDOM

Animal Kingdom is a true Australian movie without being anything like what we’ve come to think an Australian movie should be. The Outback serves no purpose here, neither to tantalize nor brutalize, though life in the bush serves as an important metaphor for the urban jungles of Melbourne.

            In its title, after all, the film promises comparisons between human violence against our own species and the territorial wars among wild beasts, hence the engraved picture of a pride of lions against the opening credits. Oliver Stone tried a similar analogy in Natural Born Killers, but it’s more subtle here. “Show him who’s king,” a thug tells his young prodigy as he hands him a revolver early in the film to settle a traffic dispute. In its bleak expose of Melbourne’s hidden worlds, Animal Kingdom paints a truer picture of Australia than Australia did.

            Michôd focuses on one family, the Codys, a dirty gang of scoundrels, junkies, and robbers very typical of the crime rings that popped up in Melbourne in the last twenty years. Leading the mob is the seemingly sweet matriarch Grandma Smurf (Jacki Weaver), who is beneath her gentle smiles and motherly comforts even nastier than her sons. Oh, she does love her boys, perhaps a little too much. The most redeemable is Darren (Luke Ford) and the most hysterical is the drug dealer Craig (Sullivan Stapleton). Working with the family is their brutish associate Baz (Joel Edgerton) who, despite his reputation as a merciless armed robber, does try to be something of a positive father figure in his own way and steer the brothers to a respectable life. One brother has disappeared and has been hiding ever since the police Armed Robbery Squad began staking out Baz’s house. When the film opens, Grandma adopts young Josh (James Frecheville), the son of her estranged daughter who has just died of an overdose.

            Michôd zeros in on the clan so closely he never moves back to show the outside world, creating a stark feeling of entrapment effective enough to tell us how few alternatives Josh has for a better future once his family takes him in. Most everyone we see is connected to the Codys in some way, be they a corrupt detective from the drug squad, a crooked lawyer, or an uninvolved associate who becomes a reluctant sanctuary for Craig on his last desperate flight from the law. Even Josh’s girlfriend Nicole (Laura Wheelwright), brought up by caring parents concerned about her future, is sucked (not entirely unwillingly) into the horror that is life with the Codys.

            Josh doesn’t seem to mind his new life much, rationalizing it as “strange but not strange at the same time”, likely because his mother, though she tried, never was able to shake off her upbringing. But things get worse when Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) returns home and takes over as the new leader, taking the family into a direction the more responsible Baz was trying to finally push them away from.

            Pope is an increasingly frightening monster of a man and Mendelsohn gives one of the most accurate depictions of a psychopath ever seen in the movies. We take him first as a criminal trying to right, at least by his family. There are moments when we come close to buying his act, especially when he tries to get Darren to open up about his inhibited sexuality and later when he reaches out to Josh. Our suspicions are heightened, however, during an ostensibly playful tussle with Craig, which Michôd films in slow motion, capturing the pent up aggression can burst through their faux unity. Games lead to savagery and, indeed, Pope was testing the brothers out as participants for a heinous revenge plan. But the Codys know of their pending doom. “Crooks always come undone,” Josh observes in voice-over narration and they are all aware of the inevitable. Only Baz seeks a way out, though, albeit too late. His death, at the hands of the police Armed Robbery Squad, is the catalyst for a chain of violence that brings the Cody legacy crumbling to the ground.

            But alternatives are never shown within reach of the boys, so it’s doubtful anything could have changed the course of events. Baz talks of possibilities in the stock market, but no pathway there is in sight. In rejecting the idea as futile, maybe Pope is more realistic than Baz after all.

 The only player existing in outside the sphere of crime and tragedy is the concerned detective Nathan Leckie played by Guy Pearce, for once using his own voice. If Animal Kingdom offers a beacon of hope amidst the moral decay, Leckie offers Josh his best chance for escape and a trustworthy father figure.

But Animal Kingdom is a film with little joy or signs of hope, but such things would have been a cheat to Michôd’s vision. His effectiveness is in his honesty. Josh ultimately escapes the clutches of his family not by following Leckie’s lead but by essentially playing his family at their own game. That is the closest Michôd comes to an upbeat ending.

Happy endings always seemed to evade Josh, though, since the path toward was hardly ever in his sight. From the moment his grandmother took him in, he practically resigned to his fate as a Cody. The Codys live in a closed world and accepting Leckie’s help is Josh’s only way out. But his uncles have friends in high places with a grip so strong that any help Leckie could offer is quickly obstructed. In the end, Josh disappoints his only true friend for the sake of his own revenge scheme, which only entraps him further in an unseen dark future.

Crime movies often fall into the trap of seducing us with the very hoods they aim to condemn. But the Codys have no glamour or charm to speak of. They are a broken family given to crime in despair. Sure, Baz and Craig buy fine homes with their loot, but there is no elegance to their lives. They steal like rats do, as a means of survival.

Michôd’s best decision was to unsensationalize the violence. The atrocities, committed with no romance or finesse, inspire not shock but gloom. Michôd creates his horror with subtle touches only a skilled filmmaker can muster. For instance, the killing of two police officers as retaliation for the death of Baz is not a cheap surprise to punctuate brooding tension. Instead, Michôd begins by showing us the two young cops preparing for their shift, receiving the call about an abandoned car, and the cold-blooded finale, absorbing us into the tragedy of the moment.

He even knows how to question our own sensibilities in a more complicated way when Craig meets his demise at the hands of the increasingly hostile police force. In a state of acute paranoia, Craig takes refuge in a friend’s farm, but the cops have the place bugged. They arrive and he runs, but we know as well as Craig does that his death is inevitable and as loathsome as he is the weight of the tragedy cannot be denied.

Animal Kingdom is uncompromising, dark, and somber, but not without a level of poignancy. That Michôd doesn’t force a ray of sunshine where he doesn’t see that one should be is not to say that his stance isn’t heartfelt. His movie is a tragedy with very real bleakness. Animal Kingdom may not be reassuring, but it is exactly the film Michôd wants it to be, an unrelenting depiction of a side of modern Australia seldom acknowledged. Few directors are so concise in their vision. He has an unyielding dedication to getting where he wants to go as a director and takes no shortcuts. In Animal Kingdom he offers us the truth and only the truth, take it or leave it.