Maybe it’s the heat, or the criminal ancestry, but there’s a violent nihilistic bent in Australian independent cinema. Blood-soaked, sundrenched flicks come stateside to plop down in art houses with little popular fanfare but great critical acclaim. Though none of them perfect, and none for the weak of stomach, Wolf Creek, The Proposition and The Square are among the most brutal films of the last five years, and will stick like a burr inside your brain.
Am I describing those three films? Yes, but also 2010’s Animal Kingdom, an Australian neo-noir filled with missteps and moments of shimmering intensity. The first shot of the film has 17-year-old Josh (James Frecheville) sitting on the couch, watching Australian Deal or No Deal with his mother slouched asleep beside him. He apathetically stares at the television, and it seems a normal day in a boring life until the paramedics he’s called show up and try to restart his mother’s heart. Josh watches them try to save his mother but keeps glancing back at the TV- an incredibly elegant critique of television’s power over reality.
The film can’t maintain this elegance, a shame, to do so would make it a masterpiece, though it does achieve the same level of intensity periodically throughout. Mom’s dead, od’ed, so Josh goes to live with Grammy Janine (Jacki Weaver) and her boys. Her boys, of course, being his uncles, and they, of course, being a gang of bank robbers. They’re types, yes: there’s drug-addled, drug-dealing Craig (Sullivan Stapleton); “The One Good Guy” Baz (Joel Edgerton); the passive, along-for-the-ride Darren (Luke Ford); and the sociopathic terror ‘Pope’ (Ben Mendelsohn). But they’re well written types, damn well written types, and writer-director David Michod pulls subtle performances from a group of solid actors.
In fact, he’d do better to trust his hard-boiled script and directing chops: as a cinematographer he’s less impressive. Though he does great work with hand held cameras (long, still shots giving the actors room to stew) the rich saturated palate sometimes conflicts with the bleak story, and he is over-reliant on slow-mo reveals, blowing his wad too early and using them too much. Add in Anthony Partos’ overbearing score, and you can describe a tenth of the film’s running time as “swelling atonal orchestral sounds play while [character] moves expressionless and silent in slow-motion.” We may have There Will Be Blood to blame, but alas, Partos is no Greenwood, and Michod’s wheelhouse differs greatly from Anderson’s.
Again, a shame, because the moments of pure viciousness, tragedy and beauty this film builds can be breathtaking. We never see a bank robbery: as befits a noir, Josh has arrived just before the fall. Instead, the cops are watching the boys, and when a cop brutally murders Baz in a parking lot (yelling “He’s got a gun!”) the remaining brothers set about making the whole world blind. Josh and his girlfriend get caught in the crossfire, and as the bodies start hitting the floor, and a kindhearted detective (Guy Pearce) tries to end the bloodshed, the intensity builds towards inevitable, doom colored climax.
Problem is, once enough sympathetic characters have gone down, the stakes slip away like air leaving a balloon through a pinhole. Josh is too empty a character: purposefully given little dialogue or emotive expression, he is positioned as the audience cipher, as a sort of on-screen camera, audience-as-protagonist. But at some point, about three quarters in, he doesn’t really have many options, or many friends, and the plot drags. Here, where we might be interested to have some introspection, we are instead given Josh sitting in chairs as the camera pulls around him in slow motion. Does the music swell dramatically? The music swells dramatically. If Michod had saved these techniques for this moment, he could have dodged the sudden slackening of tension.
Of course, only a good movie’s greatest weakness is not recognizing its own strengths. And Michod develops narrative with a method reminiscent of Truffaut, using cinema shorthand to indicate where a scene is going (i.e. Josh storms out of room, slams door) but instead of immediately fulfilling our expectations (i.e. cut to Josh driving away in a huff), he lingers on the incidental character(s), extending their scene through another emotional beat. In so doing he fleshes out every part, even the smallest, with humanity, so that his hard-nosed nihilism (the cops and robbers are all capable of great evil, while the innocent mostly wind up dead) is not tinged with misanthropy but rather with despair. He has a poet’s sense of the human spirit and can build scenes of staggering power. Not half bad for a debut feature.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
An exhaustive (1h10min long!) making of featurette, they go over the whole history of the script, production, and every single actor and casting decision, reflecting the respect Michod shows for his actors, his characters and his process. Unfortunately the whole thing is put to the melodramatic, melancholic score, so the whole hour feels like a dirge rather than a fun after-the-fact production. Still, the benchmark for making ofs far as I’m concerned. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a half-hour Q and A with Michod and Weaver, theatrical trailer and a very solid audio commentary from Michod. This is how you do a Blu-ray.
"Animal Kingdom" is on sale January 18, 2011 and is rated R. Crime. Written and directed by David Michod. Starring Ben Mendelsohn, Guy Pearce, Jacki Weaver, Joel Edgerton.
