Susan Granger’s review of “Animal Kingdom” (Sony Pictures Classics)
Director David Michod makes an auspicious debut with this densely-layered Australian coming-of-age thriller about the newest addition to a Melbourne criminal clan.
After his mother dies of a heroin overdose and the EMS ambulance carts her body away, 17 year-old Joshua Cody (James Frencheville), known as “J,” calmly telephones his estranged grandmother Janine (Jackie Weaver), nicknamed Smurf, asking for help. With nowhere else to go, he moves in with her and her brooding bank-robbing sons. There’s sexually-ambivalent Darren (Luke Ford), cocaine-dealing Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and volatile, menacing Andrew (Ben Mendelsohn), known as Pope, who winds up injecting Jay’s high-school girl-friend (Laura Wheelwright) with heroin and then smothering her. And there’s fatherly friend Barry (Joel Edgerton). They’re his family and they expect him to join the gangster business, protecting them from the police at all costs. The positive side of law enforcement is embodied by Anti-Crime Detective Senior Sgt. Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce), who is determined to win over Jay’s confidence, turning him into an informant against his murderous uncles, by dutifully explaining the heavy-handed survival-of-the-fittest allegorical theme, but Leckie’s influence is eventually undermined by the warped internal corruption surrounding him.
A member of a contemporary group of Sydney filmmakers known collectively as Blue Tongue Films, David Michod goes for a gritty, detailed, naturalistic tone, augmented by Sam Petty’s electronic score, but, unfortunately, Jay’s subdued character is written as expressionless and newcomer James Frencheville fulfills that description, his face seldom reflecting any emotion. So it’s hard to work up sympathy or empathy with such a laconic, lifeless dullard, even as his psychotic, unconventional family is self-destructing around him, proving the adage: “Crooks always come undone, always, one way or another.”
In contrast, Jacki Weaver is terrific as the unconventionally ferocious, perpetually smiling but deeply malevolent matriarch and Guy Pearce (still memorable from “L.A. Confidential”) delivers an impeccable performance.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Animal Kingdom” is a malignant, moderately suspenseful, highly stylistic 6 – but those without an ear for Aussie accents may find the low-decibel dialect often undecipherable.
