2 out of 5

Director: David Michôd

I can generally get a high level feeling on a movie based – easy enough – on whether or not I’m paying attention.  As a viewer of the modern age of distraction, I normally have a couple things going on at once on a couple different screens, but I like to give movies the chance to fully distract me from the get-go.  If I find, however many minutes in, that my hand has wavered to a mouse or gamepad, then that is generally telling about the flick’s staying power.  ‘Animal Kingdom’ promised good things from its opening scene, a cold cut to James Frecheville watching Aussie TV on the couch while a woman appears passed out next to him.  Some paramedics arrive, and we find out that – hey, it’s his mom, and she’s out on heroin.  In the next scene, James is telling his Aunt (Jacki Weaver) that mum has died, and this is how he comes to stay with her… and her drug-selling/addict son Sullivan Stapleton and friend-o’-the-family-and-part-time-bank-robber Joel Edgerton.  As director Michôd somewhat introduces these characters by letting them run rampant in the scene while Frecheville montonely VO narrates from some point in the future… my attention began to slip.  As can be seen in the director’s short film ‘Netherland Dwarf’ (streamable on the Blue Tongue website), he likes letting emotions grow organically on the screen.  In the short, this mostly works… it’s lack of a decisive stance can be excused by its relative brevity.  But this technique stretched out to full length just flounders, and having the – sorry dude – unremarkable Frecheville as your lead doesn’t help.  The dumb-founded look sells the initial scene in a black comedy way, but when it turns out that open-mouth and duh is his standard expression, there’s just no way to side with the character.  When the script actually gives him some lines, he displays some deadpan flexibility, but as his character is mostly supposed to stoically respond to events around him – which, in crime flick fashion, spiral out of control in a series of revenge killings, resulting in detective Guy Pearce attempts at recruiting James to snitch on his own fam – there simply wasn’t a really effective moment to latch onto.  And the one likeable misfit – Edgerton – exits the film early, the rest of the crew never feeling fleshed out beyond their general character sketch, perhaps owing to the film’s structure being inspired by real events and thus severing Michôd’s desire for in-frame naturalism.  Pearce’s balanced performance frankly blows the rest of the team out of the water, and there are some truly stunning shots and framing, but as with the film on the whole, these elements are experienced at a distance, disconnected from the experience in some way, and thus not as absorbing as they could be.  An interesting story, rather ploddingly applied to the screen.