Salina Art Center

Writer-director David Michôd’s riveting crime drama treads some well-worn territory: a sensitive but hard-edged, tattoo-covered 17-year-old man-child tries to escape an urban jungle where hopelessness, drug addiction, anger, and senseless violence seem to block every exit.  Moviegoers might suspect that the only novelty will be the movie’s unusual setting—the gorgeous Australian coastal city of Melbourne, its mean streets far removed from the beach-and-lobster tourist paradise of travel brochures.  But Michôd gives this powerful drama a mesmerizing intensity and shows a keen eye for detail that goes further beyond the superficial irony of focusing on shady business in one of the sunniest cities in the world.  Many films explore the squalor that tourists never see in “exotic” locales like Rio de Janeiro (featured in City of God) or Jamaica (as seen the reggae classic The Harder They Come).  Michôd’s film doesn’t linger on the contrast between Melbourne’s pretty façade and the less picturesque reality of the lower depths.  This is the only world its troubled characters know and understand, though occasionally they get a glimpse of “something better” (i.e., the middle class).  Newcomer James Frecheville is Josh, a teenager whose mother’s drug overdose thrusts him into the “care” of his grandmother Janine Cody (Jacki Weaver), the amoral, chilling, but strangely seductive leader of her notorious bank-robbing clan.  Though Janine is nicknamed “Smurf” by her partners in crime, the name Cody might be a reference to another Cody—the gangster Cody Jarrett, memorably played by James Cagney in White Heat.  More specifically, Janine Cody may remind viewers of Cody Jarrett’s “Ma”—and Weaver’s evil, charismatic portrayal of “mother love” gone bad is worthy of comparison to Margaret Wycherly’s Ma Jarrett.  As queen of her brutal but increasingly-desperate brood (once the hunters, now the hunted), Janine Cody commands the screen—a real achievement, considering her company, particularly the weasel-like sociopath Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn).  The violence is sometimes gruesome, but Michôd doesn’t celebrate the gang’s bloodthirsty nature or revel in torture.  This is a hard-hitting, realistic film with a compassionate center, exemplified by Detective Leckie (Guy Pearce), who believes Josh is redeemable but isn’t above using the kid to put his family behind bars.  Just as he did in L.A. Confidential, Pearce takes the less-showy role of “straight arrow detective” and gives the character layers of depth and complexity that make basic decency almost as compelling as villainy.  Though Michôd cares about his young hero, Animal Kingdom doesn’t grasp for the traditional happy ending.  In this world it’s almost impossible to break free; the most admirable human impulse is just trying to do so, win or lose.  It’s a downbeat theme but the film plays fair.  The title gives it to us right away: there’s a pecking order, a food chain that can’t be broken.  Even the crooks have to recognize their place in the order; their glory days are fading, their authority in freefall as the power of the cops ascends—helped because the police are now using the lawless methods of the criminals, preferring to kill their prey, planting guns and drugs on the bodies, rather than arrest them and watch the “bad guys” walk in and out of prison.  With indelible characters that are much more differentiated, unpredictable, and fascinating than the stock figures that inhabit most crime thrillers, Animal Kingdom is a welcome infusion of energy into the tired genre.  It also sneaks in a subtle, intelligent meditation on Fate that one doesn’t expect from this kind of movie—but it works terrifically, the adrenalin rush of the classic crime film perfectly balanced with a more contemplative, somber mood that makes the film resonate in the memory long after the final scene.