Animal Kingdom
Review
by Anthony Morris
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Animal Kingdom
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Australia makes so few truly mainstream films that sometimes
it's easy to mistake an arthouse effort for something that has truly
wide appeal.
Put another way, just because Animal Kingdom
is about a bunch of bogan criminals (who are loosely based on
Melbourne's Pettingill crime family from the 80s - they also inspired
the crims in the excellent ABC legal drama Janus) doesn't mean it's going to go down well with the Underbelly crowd.
Make
no mistake, this is a very good film : first time writer / director
David Michod has put together an skillfully crafted look at a dark and
sinister world, full of threat and malice.
Unfortunately,
while it's pluses are obvious and consistent - the film looks great,
the acting is compelling from the entire cast, and numerous individual
scenes are compelling viewing - it's flaws, while less obvious, end up
making the film less than what it could have been. The
story itself is fairly straightforward : a teenager (first-time film
actor James Frecheville) is taken in by a family he hardly knows after
the overdose death of his mother.
A family of armed robbers
(Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton) and drug dealers (Sullivan Stapleton)
overseen by their sweetly charming grandmother Smurf (Jackie Weaver). It
makes sense that the characters are fairly one-dimensional types (the
manic drug dealer, the psycho armed robber - though Mendelsohn almost
breaks the mould with a chilling performance, the "good" crim who wants
out) because we're seeing them through the eyes of a teen outsider who
barely knows them.
But the teen outsider is so restrained and
controlled a character himself (on purpose - it's important to the
story) that it's hard to actually care about any of the characters or
their fates.
It doesn't help that occasionally the film gets
arty for the sake of being arty (you can have too many slow-motion
shots while sombre music plays) and those hoping for some gritty crime
drama should be warned that at its core this is basically a
coming-of-age story (AKA "the summer that changed everything").
Again,
very little of this is automatically bad : Michod clearly knew the kind
of film he wanted to make, and he's achieved his goals admirably. But
for all the hype hailing this as a great film, it's important to note
that Animal Kingdom does have its flaws - and in the end, might only be a very good film. 3.5 out
of 5
Animal Kingdom
Australian release: 3rd June,
2010
Official
Site: Animal Kingdom
Cast: Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Luke Ford, Jacki Weaver
Director: David Michôd
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