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The gritty and realistic tone and look of this Australian crime drama inspired by real events keeps me on edge throughout the time as it portrays a teenage boy caught up in a dilemma on dangerous ground that he never wished he was apart of. The way our main character, J. (James Frecheville), is reunited with his estranged criminal relatives after his mother’s death is awkward at best with his fairly young uncles, but only is welcomed with warm arms by his grandmother Janine (Jackie Weaver), who carries incestuous undertones to the way she kisses her sons.

It seems like an innocent life, especially with the presence of the family’s close associate Braz (Joel Edgerton) behaving as a family-oriented man who doesn’t behave like a rough gangster, compared to the oldest son in the family, Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), who the family feels tense around. Darren (Luke Ford) comes as more quiet and shy and Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) as a rowdy smoking hooligan, which keeps distinguishing the brothers as to what they bring to the family. They come as normal in those ways without coming off as too dangerous for J. to be around and that they can fill in what was lost to him by his mother’s drug addiction and later death. When a sudden tragic loss shakes the family, Pope doesn’t hesitate to take matters into his own hands in a cold-blooded manner, which only endangers the family more and puts J. in a dangerous dilemma when he becomes the key witness for the police against his family’s crimes. Pope is least of all hard on J. to keep quiet about anything to the police, but his paranoia and psychotic tendencies are more uncontrollable than J. thinks and he grows more afraid of him. He is not safe with his family, not even the police either, even though the compassionate police sergeant Leckie (Guy Pearce) assures him that he is being protected by the “strong” when his family cannot, the way it works in the animal kingdom when the wild mammals have to look after their packs.

J. is not very strong, he is traumatized, dazed, and nervous in his expressions and behavior which James Frecheville conveys authentically and quietly in his performance. He is the eyes for the audience and the one we can sympathize with the most because he wants nothing to do with his family’s lifestyle, but he doesn’t want to pay the price for turning against for them, regardless of how much Leckie tries to protect him when he’s oblivious to the numbers of corrupt cops who have taken matters into their own hands or have connections with the family. The lawyer to the family is not very trustworthy either as he is smug a coke-addled scumbag who doesn’t like defending J. on the family’s behalf and regards him as a stupid kid that he wouldn’t care if he ended up getting killed. J. can’t feel safe with anyone, especially when his granny Janine is determined to protect her sons at any cost and schemes in a sweet devious way to make sure of that, which shows a different layer in Weaver’s performance as opposed to just being a sweet dumb matriarch. Mendelsohn makes Pope more intimidating and frightening to feel safe around because at any moment that he’s compelled to snap, he won’t settle it down in a talk. With him, the tension is always on and it raises the stakes higher.

This is a gritty and treacherous world where good and evil are hard to distinguish when you’re surrounded by the greedy, the psychotic, and the corrupt who do anything to protect their own sides with gruesome methods. It’s not something the young protagonist wants to be involved with that his innocence seems broken by the experience. It’s a dark trial for a coming-of-age story and it can make us feel as traumatized and scared of our surroundings just as J. is about his. When your only family acts like the lions protecting your skin, they can just easily rip you to pieces. When the law seems like they’re the strong ones protecting the innocent from danger, they are also capable of exploiting that job for their own benefit. That kind of life can make your life feel like a joke when no moral deed can make a difference in the end when both sides are equally dangerous and corrupt, which makes it harder to see how you can find your way out of that life with nowhere else to go.

The suspense keeps pounding in the heart for J. as he struggles for a compromising solution to this life-and-death dilemma and it’s hard to breathe once it’s over because the social climate of the underworld and the corrupt is much scarier to live with than what you see in horror films. It’s an undying problem in society that makes people feel trapped and unsafe when there is no strong moral boundary and you have to find a survival method to live in that animal kingdom. We are not always so different from animals when we always need survival methods to stand against the threats in our kingdom to the extreme, something which we are learning with J. as he grows through the situation and leaves a heavy impact on the audience for its gritty authentic look at a real lifestyle.

Dans ce beau portrait de famille, semblable à des fauves (à le ralenti des baisers à la chef de meute, qui rappelle le cinéma animalier ! et qui donne à l’ensemble un parfum musqué, sauvage), David Michôd signe un film noir, particulièrement rugueux et sec, qui ne cherche à rien magnifier, surtout pas la nullité crasse du clan. L’intrigue, les personnages, les effets de réalisation nous mettent en alerte sensorielle maximum… une alerte en grande partie déçue par le manque de prise qu’offrent l’histoire, les acteurs et la réalisation. Le manque de sentiment, l’expressivité, la lenteur de l’action… semblent nous refuser le plaisir que nos sens appelaient. Dommage.

It may have started as a penal colony but, for whatever reason, it’s hard for outsiders to think of Australia as a place with its own brand of violent criminals. To many it remains a land of beaches and kangaroos, and so bank robbers seem misplaced. But David Michôd knows the land well and in his directorial debut he shows us what an Animal Kingdom the land down under can be.
It’s a story of generational poverty in the Cody family, a matriarchy of bank robbers and drug dealers, created as if Danny Boyle, Guy Ritchie, and Ben Affleck had been thrown in a blender with a can of Vegemite. What comes out is a more accurate depiction of a part of Melbourne than anything in the movie Australia.
From the outset, Michôd promises to hold nothing back. We first see young Josh Cody (James Frecheville) greeting paramedics into his mother’s flat. He is so transfixed on the television that we don’t realize until he says so that his mom just overdosed on heroin. He treats the emergency as a common occurrence, which it might be.
Be that as it may, the mother dies and Josh is taken in by his grandma Janine (Jacki Weaver), matriarch of the Cody crime ring which includes her sons Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and Darren (Luke Ford). She often gives motherly advice, but conceals a mean streak. This was Weaver’s most notable film role after a life on the Australian stage. With her Best Supporting Actress nomination, she has cemented her screen reputation.
Joining the family is Josh’s other uncle, Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), who has been lying low hiding from authorities. At first, he’s a hard fellow to read. He’s clearly trying to become the patriarch, but for what purpose? Is he trying to make a sincere connection or making his place as the new lead? Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Animal Kingdom is Pope’s evolution as the dopey brother to a ruthless assassin. For this reason alone, Pope was the hardest character to play and Mendelsohn, amazingly, delivers the most memorable performance in the film.
Josh passively accepts what his family does and, still, may be the only salvageable Cody. In an almost Shakespearian fashion, he is the only one who can understand the dangers of being with the Codys. By the end of the film he will be proven correct in his observation that all crooks live in fear knowing that their crimes will inevitably catch up to them some day.
Animal Kingdom does have a tragic vibe, but instead of repeating the tale of the gangster as a tragic hero, Michôd goes more for ingeniously constructed suspense. Eventually the police catch up to the Codys and the tension stems from their fear that Josh will squeal.
Caught somewhat undeservedly in the middle of all this is Josh’s girlfriend Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), a wannabe punk who rebels against her parents in the typical-teenager ways. But she falls into a scary trap when Pope starts to think of her as a liability and, in the end, our sympathy is with her parents who couldn’t keep her safe.
The detective played by Guy Pearce is the one totem of morality in the film and he offers to help Josh if only he can get him to cooperate. By then we want Josh to talk as we have seen what his family is capable of and the suspicion remains that he would be less reluctant to point fingers were the lawyer, who is a family friend, not present in the interrogation room.
This is a bad gang and they take their violence to unprecedented levels, going as far as killing policemen as revenge. But Animal Kingdom is not a film of excess or gratuitous turns. Watching it, one has the feeling that Michôd is striving for honesty, a fact made evident by his less than happy ending. Yes, the bad guy gets what was coming to him but, in the process, Josh has only fallen deeper into his family’s web as he is now much more like one of them. It’s a brutal and candid film of the kind we rarely get. There’s nothing pretty about it nor should there be. Neither did Michôd intend for there to be. It’s a story he obviously felt he had to tell and he does so the right way.

Il arrive de temps en temps que d’Australie, ou d’autres pays anglophones, proviennent des films qu’on croirait issus du moule hollywoodien. Animal Kingdom, grand prix à Sundance cette année, en fait partie.

La ruse du film de David Michôd est simple mais parfaitement exécutée : transvaser un fantasme américain – la famille de psychopathes criminels – dans un paysage étranger, commun par la langue. C’est l’illusion première mise en œuvre par le film, qui a su tromper les jurés à Sundance et failli leurrer l’académie des Oscars. C’est une vieille soupe dans un meilleur pot.

Animal Kingdom se déroule à Melbourne de nos jours. Narrée du point de vue de Josh, agneau innocent et témoin de l’histoire, cette trame conventionnelle, filmée en Scope pour le style, use et abuse de codes moraux manichéens et datés. Ceux-ci excluent l’émotion et la sensibilité d’un long-métrage qui se transforme en polar où l’intrigue repose non pas sur la narration mais sur le degré de perversité des protagonistes.
Alors Josh, subterfuge de scénariste à défaut d’avoir une utilité dramatique propre, devient le contrepoint d’une famille dont le sadisme transparaît à chaque séquence, accumulation de vexations et d’actions immorales. Celle-ci finit par positionner le spectateur contre ses membres, contre l’intrigue, contre le film.

Animal Kingdom n’est pourtant pas dépourvu de séquences intéressantes, voire prometteuses (certaines incluant Josh, celles avec la matriarche – interprétée par Jackie Weaver -, la fin). L’introspection de Josh est également une caractérisation bien pensée. Cependant, l’absence de dimension tragique grève en permanence toute dramaturgie fonctionnelle, et même les efforts cabotins de Guy Pearce ne suffisent plus à ramener le spectateur dans un film qu’il a définitivement quitté. C’est que le film australien, en jouant le tout psychologique et la simplification excessive, finit sa course dans un entre-deux amer où se confrontent le film rêvé et l’objet réalisé par David Michôd.

Le schéma global du long-métrage est finalement épuisant par sa dimension caricaturale (même pas assumée) : l’innocence, la désillusion, l’horreur, la culpabilité, le sacrifice, la vengeance morale. Cette suite prévisible et transparente désamorce à elle seule toute adhésion à ce qu’on pourrait appeler cruellement un film de gare.

Nul doute qu’Hollywood s’attachera prochainement les services de David Michôd dans une énième recette de vieille soupe, sûrement un thriller policé et froid, où le peu d’âme qui transparaissait dans cet Animal Kingdom sera depuis longtemps évanoui. C’est que des sirènes puissantes partagent désormais le cinéma entre ceux qui cherchent à le réinventer et ceux qui se contentent de l’imiter.
Et Josh de préfigurer le cinéaste qui reste apathique devant l’imitation qu’il a produite, aliénation de tout un pan de cinéma américain, singerie maladroite de Sidney Lumet, de Jerry Schatzberg, de Michael Mann. Personne n’aime les copieurs.

http://louvreuse.net/Critique/animal-kingdom.html

Title: Animal Kingdom
Year: 2010
Country: Australia
Language: English
Genre: Crime
Director: David Michôd
Writers: David Michôd
Cast:
James Frecheville
Ben Mendelsohn
Jacki Weaver
Guy Pearce
Luke Ford
Joel Edgerton
Sullivan Stapleton
Dan Wylie
Laura Wheelwright
Anthony Hayes
Rating: 7/10

An earthy story of how a LION KING is born in an Australian pusher family. I think it is a brave film in spite of its comfortless representation.

The film is surrounded by a sullen emotion since its very beginning, a young boy was watching the TV while while his dead mother was lying beside him in the sofa. The instant feeling was that this boy must be exceptional in some ways. Then we witnessed the downhill of a maternal criminal family, until the final moment (literally in the end), I could be relieved to see the young stud has metamorphosed to be the new backbone of the family (otherwise the film would be so depressed).

Writer and the first-time director David Michod actually did a great job, the thriller tension is excellently built, though the camera work is somewhat biased toward inexpertness, which creates some uneasiness for spectators. The score is repetitious each time the suspenseful moments are near (with an unimaginative melody).

The film began as a Sundance winner, and swept 2010 Australian Film Institute Awards too, and now buzz for Jacki Weaver’s coming Oscar nomination is strong, I do adore her performance and I think she deserves an nomination (not my win though), especially the sharp tenacity and cruelness under her sweet voice, also the mother fixation between her and her sons is well exposed. Ben Mendelsohn deserves some recognition as well as the creepy and vicious uncle; as for the new-comer James Frecheville, his performance is comparatively prosaic, I cannot sense the changeover of his character, which is a major disappointment for me.

It’s a brave Aussie indie film and does add some fresh air into the over-crowded gangster/police thriller genre, good luck in the Oscars (not a main contender, but a supporting actress and a screenplay nomination should be highly possible)!

This twisted family crime drama is one of the best things to come out of Australia since The Proposition. Similar to how Copland (Sylvester Stallone’s shinning moment as an actor) was looked upon as a modern-day western, i’d look at Animal Kingdom same the way. In fact, Its like a cross between a los angeles crime drama mixed with the western genre.
A lot of the recent films to come out of Australia all seem to share the same moody atmosphere, missing from a lot of US crime/dramas. Ever since the great Australian directors like Peter Weir and Nicholas Roeg moved away from the Australian film scene, there haven’t been to many classics to come out of that continent. In fact, Alex Proyas, the only somewhat more recent Australian director to show some kind of promise in the late 80’s and early 90’s (Crow and Dark City) went on make typical Hollywood films like I Robot and Knowing. But it looks like over the last couple of years, Australia has been making its presence known in the film world (especially the crime genre). Animal Kingdom will surely be a classic (at least to the australian film scene) later on down the road. The film is loosely based on real life events that took place in Melbourne Australia in the late 80’s. In the story, the main character (Josh) goes to live with his family of criminals after his mother OD’s. His new family situation is quite strange. All of his uncles and cousins seems to be very open about their criminal lifestyle. All but one of his uncles seems to be normal/level-headed. And they all seem to be under the lead of their; mother, Janine (played by Jacki Weaver) who not only exhibits some serious incestuous undertones towards her sons but doesnt seem to care that they’re criminals. After one of them is murdered by the police, the oldest brother gets revenge by murdering two random patrolmen. Josh gets caught up in the middle, and struggles with weather or not to be loyal to his family or to testify against them for the murder of the two police. Things get complicated when his family suspects he will testify against them, and they set out a plan to silence him. A lot of the moodiness in the film comes from dark, ambient soundtrack, similar to the films of Michael Mann (Collateral, Miami Vice, Heat, etc). Animal Kingdom has great acting all around, but the standout performance comes from Ben Mendelsohn (who plays the eldest brother and Josh’s uncle). Fans of movies like The Last Wave and Walkabout will surely enjoy this.