Animal Kingdom
Animal Kingdom is the best Australian film that I have ever seen, and I want you to believe it without irony.

There are some accolades that sound like the very opposite; the best giblet-based pate, for example, or the best late-night garage. So, I want you to believe me when I say that Animal Kingdom is the best Australian film that I have ever seen, and I want you to believe it without irony.

Animal Kingdom (I know – it sounds like a Disney romp, but stay with me) follows the eighteen year old, vaguely gormless, apparently ‘invisible’ Joshua ‘Jay’ Cody as he passes in to the guardianship of his grandmother. Well, his grandmother and extended family of criminal uncles; Darren, Baz, Craig and Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody. For this, like so many that has gone before it, is a film about the knotty crossover between family and organised crime.

The film opens with the best scene since James Bond sprinted up a crane.  Television footage of Australia’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire cuts to Jay, standing beside the sofa, still staring at the screen, as a team of paramedics  examine his dead mother. She has died, Jay tells them, still glancing over at Who Wants to be a Millionaire, of a heroin overdose. And, just like that, the glossy, metropolitan world of Melbourne is stripped away to reveal a dingy, depressing, quietly criminal world.

At the centre of this family is, of course, the matriarch. Grandma ‘Smurf’, played by Jacki Weaver, is the sort of soft-voiced, pastel-wearing, blonde haired grandma that calls everyone honey and seems to be constantly making sandwiches. The boys swarm about her, snorting coke, playing fart jokes and, as a sort of background hum, counting money and planning jobs. Until, that is, the benevolent, bear-like uncle Baz is shot at point blank range by a policemen, creating the sort of void of authority and leadership that drives classical tragedy from Othello to Thomas Kyd.

With Baz blown away, the itinerant Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody twitches, slimes and threatens his way to the head of the family creating fear, confusion and tragedy in his wake. As things spiral out of control Jay is faced with that age-old dilemma; to trust the police  – embodied by the wildly mustachiod Guy Pearce, who plays a fantastic amalgamation of his LA Confidential cop and Gary Oldman’s Lt. Gordon in The Dark Knight – or to stay loyal to his slowly fragmenting family.

The result is low key, subtle, tense, surprising and brilliant. Which, of course, cannot be said for Priscilla Queen of the Desert.