My take on "Animal Kingdom"

I just finished watching the Oscars, but I feel absolutely now desire to write about who deserved what award or who wore what. Why? Well, because 1. virtually no one outside of my movie group is reading this anyway (so far) 2. We're not trying to be Entertainment Weekly or Access Hollywood or whatever and 3. I still haven't posted on the movie that Craig and Nick showed in February: Animal Kingdom.

Anyone who has read the other posts will already know that we all loved the film, so let me digress and flash back to some 19th century French lit for a moment. After I watched "Animal Kingdom," I couldn't help thinking imagining how much Emile Zola would have liked it. Let me give a quick and unpolished translation of something Zola wrote in the preface of his 1867 novel, Thérèse Raquin:

"...my goal has been above all a scientific one. When my two characters, Thérèse and Laurent were created, it pleased me to ask and answer certain problems: thus, I tried to explain the strange union that can come about between two different temperaments, I showed the profound conflict of a sanguine nature put into contact with a nervous nature. If you read the novel with care, you will see that each chapter is the study of a serious physiological case. In a word, I had but one desire: [...] to look for the beast in them, to see nothing but the beast, to throw them into a violent drama, and scrupulously note the sensations of these beings. I simply did on two living beings the kind of autopsy that surgeons do on a corpse."

 Indulge me with one more quote:

"The loves of my two heroes are the satisfaction of a need; the murder they commit is a consequence of their adultery, a consequence that they accept in the same way that wolves accept the assassination of sheep; finally, what I was obligated to call their regrets, consists of a simply organic disorder, a rebellion of a nervous system on the brink. The soul is perfectly absent, I readily admit, since that was exactly what I intended."

 One of the early shots in David Michôt's "Animal Kingdom" is a clip from "Deal or No Deal" in which a gleeful contestant crosses her arms and shouts "NO DEAL!" while the crowd cheers as if a gladiator had just killed his opponent. "Deal or No Deal" is possibly to most minimalistic game show ever created in that it strips away nearly all intellect. Jeopardy has its trivia, Wheel of Fortune has you solve word puzzles, The Price is Right requires you to test your retail pricing skills, but Deal or No Deal boils it all down to two basic choices.

If "Animal Kingdom" reminds me of naturalism, it is because Michôt strips down human conflict to its core. Watching young Joshua navigate the politics of his corrupt family and the equally corrupt criminal justice system is like watching Ken Jennings trapped in the wrong game show. His choice is literally "deal or no deal" and we keep wanting poor Joshua to say "I'll take "Married with Children" for $800."  We hope there are other choices. If nothing better, then perhaps "Deal and No Deal." But the most disturbing thing is that you don't get the luxury of a deus ex machina ending in a piece of naturalist fiction. It really has to be one or the other, and the crowd cheering "no deal" doesn't necessarily have your best interest at heart. In the end, you realize that the other characters, however powerful, have no more power to change the rules than does Joshua. The only freedom in "Animal Kingdom" is the freedom to choose a side.