Happily sampling nasty beats and riffs from the Scorsese catalog, the new Aussie crime saga Animal Kingdom begins with a hushed but breath-holding set piece: A gawky lad watches TV on the couch next to his dozing mum, until the already-summoned EMTs arrive and the boy calmly tells them that she OD'd on smack. As it becomes clear that she's dead, his eyes continually and habitually veer back to the stupid game show on TV.
First-time writer and director David Michôd limns a dank and lost family history in just these few barely conscious gestures. The alienated teen is Joshua (James Frecheville) who, with nowhere else to go, moves in with his garrulous grandmother Smurf (Jacki Weaver) and is accepted into her roiling nest of pathology. This chintzy suburban house is where up to half of the movie plays out, dominated by Smurf's three sons: Darren (Luke Ford), a surly post-teen visibly uneasy with following the family line; Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), a tattooed coke brute; and Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), the oldest and a bank robber off his meds, hiding from the fuzz.
With Joshua's narration, the template is GoodFellas but without the crescendos. No speeding bullet, Michôd's film luxuriates in its own exaggerated sense of tragedy, observing the family as it self-destructs under pressure. But the director's strenuous efforts to accumulate tension are often only that. Still, Animal Kingdom is a work of obvious ambition, and seeing a debut filmmaker swing for the fences like this is its own kind of satisfaction.
