(4/5)

Evoking classic crime family stories but on a claustrophobic scale, Animal Kingdom peers into the backyards and flats of Melbourne’s underworld with an intensity and strength of narrative and character that belies writer/director David Michôd’s first-timer status. This could easily have been another run of the mill crime drama, and it flirts with cliché a fair number of times, but it never loses its drive nor its focus on the characters.

We come into this family of criminals (a gang of armed robbers, apparently a huge problem at one point in Melbourne history) through 17-year-old J. His mother dies in the deliciously morbid yet darkly funny teaser sequence and J has no other option than to go live with his grandmother and four uncles – a family his mother left years ago in an attempt to protect J from them. Now thrown in with them by necessity, he soon gets pulled into the family business. Unfortunately, the first major matter of business is revenge on the cops, which takes a predictably nasty turn and soon J has to choose between informing on his family to the cops (led by Guy Pearce) or irrevocably siding with his uncles despite his ever-more-serious issues with them and their way of life.

The four brothers are all markedly different in personality, from largely ineffectual to jovial to paranoid to quietly creepy. The oldest brother, Pope, is played chillingly by Ben Mendelsohn – he’s feared by his other brothers for good reason, but in a very good move on Michoôd’s part, he doesn’t DO anything to seem to merit this fear until very late in the film – he simply IS, and Mendelsohn’s portrayal is so strong that you never doubt for a second what this man is capable of, even when he’s calmly getting a glass of water or joking with his youngest brother. Yet Mendelsohn isn’t the only glue holding the film together; Jacki Weaver plays the grandmother as the perfect crime family matriarch – warm and grandmotherly at times, cold as steel other times. She really steps into the lead in the second half of the film and wow, is she brilliant. She’s a very tiny woman, but she holds all these big strong criminal men, including Pope, in the palm of her hand.

Some critics have been ripping on James Frecheville, the newcomer playing J, as the weak link in the film’s cast, but I don’t think he is. He plays a much more passive role, but that’s really what’s called for by the script and the character. J is new to all this and he spends a good bit of time just taking it in and trying to figure out what he should do – basically will he take his rightful place in the animal kingdom or rebel against it. He’s not as magnetic as Mendelsohn and Weaver, but he does a fine job in what is basically an audience-surrogate role.

There were a couple of times, as I mentioned, that the film started to veer offbase for me, but it always came back and I ended up appreciating where it had taken me. It looks great, with an appropriate use of shallow focus and though the slow-motion transitions drifted a bit toward the cliched, they’re fairly effective. It may not be a completely original take on the crime family dynamic, but it’s certainly a solid entry in the genre and continues a streak of excellent, gritty, darkly humorous (though this one is mostly serious, I did find some parts funny, though maybe that’s just me) Australian crime thrillers. Note the connection through actor Joel Edgerton to The Square (dir. Nash Edgerton), which was in American cinemas earlier this year and which Kurt reviewed quite favorably. Though the plots are nothing alike and Animal Kingdom plays much straighter and less absurd than The Square, there’s still a similarity in visual style and mood that makes me hope this is a trend and we can look for more Aussie films in this vein. I’m loving them so far.

Animal Kingdom is available on DVD and Blu-ray on January 11th.

DVD Extras: Making of featurette, interviews, behind the scenes footage, film trailer and a director’s commentary.