Kingdom Come

If Outrageous Fortune is our local version of a criminal family, then Animal Kingdom is entirely the opposite. It’s not even the Australian answer to The Godfather, just an incredibly well done noir crime thriller…

Animal Kingdom
Winner of the Sundance Film Festival 2010 Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema – Dramatic.

An expressionless teenager sits slumped on a couch watching a trashy game-show on TV as a woman (we soon learn is his mother) lays motionless next to him. It’s not until the paramedic’s turn up that we realise she is lying dead from a drug overdose. It is almost unbelievable, the calmness, of this young teenager named Joshua ‘J’ Cody given the situation, but rookie writer/director David Michod manages to instill a grim trembling in the pit of your stomach – a quiet suspenseful worry which will remain for the entire length of his debut feature film, Animal Kingdom.

Welcome to Melbourne’s twisted underbelly of dangerous criminals and compromised cops. After his mother’s death, J (James Frecheville) is left with nowhere else to go and is taken under the wing of his grandmother, Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody (Jacki Weaver). Smurf is the smiling bubbly blonde matriarch of Melbourne’s notorious bank robbing Cody family. Although his mother was a heroin addict, it turns out she was right to be keeping J far from Ma Cody and her ruthless clan. While Smurf takes J in with open arms, her three sons are more concerned with evading the police who are increasingly breathing down the family’s neck. You’d be right for getting the sense that things, already teetering dangerously on the edge, were about to fall seriously apart.

Animal Kingdom forgoes fancy camerawork for deliberate tracking shots that give the scenes space and allow a suspenseful undercurrent to settle in with its viewers. The most terrifying character is surely Pope Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) whom we hear of many times before being introduced to him in person. Mendelsohn’s character is so calm and softly-spoken that it makes the terrible crimes he commits in the film and the words that come from his mouth almost too much to bear. It’s a really a terrific performance. In perhaps the most chilling scene, Pope casually picks up J’s teenage girlfriend who is passed out from the heroin he injected her with and lays her on a bed standing over her, staring emptily at her exposed thigh. It is enough to make you feel a little sick – but sick and you just can’t stop watching because it’s such good cinema – that kind of sick.

When J meets a seemingly good-guy police investigator (played by Guy Pearce) he must decide whether to rat out his notorious uncles or inevitably follow them into their losing battle. Smurf Cody isn’t as cuddly and loving as she seems though. Will she turn on J in order to delay losing more of her precious sons?

If Outrageous Fortune is our local version of a criminal family, then Animal Kingdom is entirely the opposite. There’s little humour to be had, unless you count the Cody brothers joking around before they head out to murder two unsuspecting police officers. It’s not even the Australian answer to The Godfather, just an incredibly well done noir crime thriller.

Although at times it may feel as though director Michod’s story borders on the unbelievable (the Australian police can’t be that corrupt, surely!?) he manages to sweep the viewer away into his world where the protagonist, J, has been thrust into the arms of his family, a family that are crumbling apart in a losing battle against the law. It’s definitely a piece of cinema worth watching. Even more so because it was made just right across the ditch. There’s something refreshing about this kind of crime drama when it’s not spoken in the usual American tongue. The photography seems more real and closer to home, and the characters as if they might actually be living next door.

Animal Kingdom won’t have you at the edge of your seat. It’s not that kind of thriller. But you’ll be slumped helplessly back in it, and most certainly not able to exhale until the final credits start to roll.

By Alex de Freitas, 25 August 2010.