Animal Kingdom leads the pride.
Directed by David Michôd. Starring Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton
We certainly like our crime dramas gritty in this country. Michôd’s Animal Kingdom has a familiarity that does not betray the brilliant story-telling at work. It sits proudly among our best such as Blue Murder, Idle Hands and Chopper , if not ahead of the pack.
It opens to a beautifully haunted montage of grainy surveillance video footage and theatrical music reminiscent of the chilling soundtracks favoured by Coppola.
The story is richly steeped in the battleground climate of mid-80’s Melbourne, when the crims were bad and the cops were worse. Seventeen-year old Josh or “Jay” watches the paramedics wheel his heroin addict mother out a corpse and calls his estranged grandmother (played brilliantly by Jackie Weaver as the matriarch) to ask her what he should do next. What follows is an intricately told, slow-burning mounting of intensity as Jay becomes enveloped by his criminal family, led by this sickly sweet lioness as they wage war with the police.
The police have picked Jay as the weakest link in the picture, not yet fully indoctrinated in his uncle’s ways they pressure him to assist them which becomes a more and more tempting offer the more violent and threatening things become at home.
The ensemble cast demonstrates the country’s best standard of acting, an artful tableau of a modern day Kelly gang. Young James Frenchville’s acting debut Jay debuts is exciting alongside the veteran talent of Medelsohn et al . His menacing and paranoid Uncle Pope, captures both the weakness and danger of a scum-bag cornered. The genius behind this delicate performance is what has you sweaty palmed as you watch this Shakespearian drama inspired by real events such as the 1988 Walsh Street murders, it feels very much like it could be all be true. Like there’s an Uncle Pope in a suburban street near you.
The film attracted ferocious hype after claiming grand jury prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, all well deserved.
Four and a half stars .