8 stars

dir: Mark Romanek

2010

What a strange, sad film. Watching Never Let Me Go was a profoundly melancholy experience for me, despite the fact that not much overtly happens, and none of my tears flowed in programmed Pavlovian response to deftly deployed violins or postcard photography.

After all, I’m not some flouncy squats-to-piss girl’s blouse. Even if the ending of Toy Story 3 made me weep like a little girl with a skinned knee. No, no sooky la-la, I.

At its heart it’s a simple love story involving three people, but its setup is anything but simple. The flick, based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, posits an alternate history timeline where certain medical breakthroughs in our history changed the course of humanity.

And not for the better, as far as the protagonists are concerned. The flick’s timeline covers three distinct time periods, being the 1970s, the 80s and the 90s. Though the setting and the environs don’t really change with the passage of time, our protagonists grow up, and change, and realise just how awful their predicament is.

When they’re just kids, at a very exclusive school called Hailsham, we see pretty quickly that this isn’t a Hogwarts International School of Magical Whimsy and Delight. Mostly, we know this because everything’s so drab, drab in that way that Britain does so well. It’s a drabness, a leeching of colour and life that’s meant to recall an even earlier time of rationing and fearing the air raid sirens and clustering in bomb shelters and singing mocking songs about the Germans.

Hailsham is lorded over by an imposing schoolmistress played by Charlotte Rampling, who weightily intones to the children how important it is for them to stay healthy at all times, for theirs is a sacred and charmed life meant for greater service to humanity. Not for them the callow joys of smoking or fucking, no.

At least that’s what it looks like to me. Three children, out of a large group of healthy, bright children, form a strange bond. Kathy (played as an adult by the always excellent Carrie Mulligan), Ruth (the always bony and frightening Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield). Tommy is artistic, incompetent at sports and subject to screaming rages. Kathy ignores the mockery of the other children, and seeks to lighten his burdens by caring about him. Ruth, being a total bitch, sees Kathy’s affections, and driven by jealousy, interposes herself between the two once it is made apparent that Tommy loves Kathy as well.

dir: David Michôd

2010

It’s not entirely clear why the film is called Animal Kingdom until past the middle of the flick, when Guy Pearce’s character has to explicitly spell it all out: everything in nature, like in the Australian bush, inherently knows its place. There are trees that live for thousands of years, and insects that die in the space of time it takes to think of them. There are predators and prey, the strong and the weak, and they all have to compensate accordingly.

It’s a moment of exposition that sounds superfluous, because it’s rarely a good idea to explain your title, but it’s used wisely. It’s used by a character who thinks he has the measure of the person he’s speaking to, who thinks this is the best way to convince him to go along with his program.

He couldn’t be more wrong.

Australian cinema has often gone to the crime well to come up with its quality television programs and movies, and this flick certainly doesn’t come up dry. It’s as good as a lot of reviewers are saying it is, but what I failed to glean from other people’s comments and analyses was how emotionally complicated it is, how tension-filled and how grim. And how little it compromises.

Yes, it deals with a family of crims, but this isn’t a mob style organised crime story, or the tits and violence concoction that is the Underbelly franchise. In fact it’s the complete antithesis of all that trashy splendour. It’s mostly a story about a kid called Josh, who calls himself J (James Frecheville), who, upon the death of his mother, moves in with his grandmother and uncles.

His uncles are hardcore crims, of the armed robbery variety, but in the main, they’re reasonable guys. The eldest brother, though, is operating on a different level than the rest, implied as being related to mental illness. Or the fact that he’s a truly ruthless bastard.

Though they call him Pope, Andrew Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) is introduced to us in an innocuous way, seeming, like the rest of the brothers, to be a remnant of an earlier age. He’s not exactly strapping on metal armour and taking on the cops at Glenrowan, but he seems lost during a conversation with his brother Barry (Joel Edgerton), as they wonder about alternatives to their current method of income earning. Barry recommends that Pope invest in stocks online, and Pope, confused, talks about not even having a computer.

The problem they face is not the desire of the police to arrest them for their many crimes: it’s a more uniquely Australian problem, at least in the way that history has been transmuted for the purposes of grounding this story.

dir: John Hillcoat

Oh gods is this film depressing. It’s not as completely hideous and bleak as the Cormac McCarthy novel from which it takes its name, since it leaves out some of the most horrifying bits. Even without some of that stuff, good goddamn is it depressing.

John Hillcoat has made some grim flicks, like Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead and The Proposition, but this out-grims them all. And as with The Proposition, adding to the bleak landscape and sombre atmosphere is a score created by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Of the soundtracks they’ve done together, well, this is of a piece, and whilst it’s not as powerful as the one they managed for that Jesse James flick whose title was almost longer than its running time, it’s still pretty devastating.

This film mostly has three characters. Sure there are others, but three characters are the majority that we look at and care about. There’s The Man (Viggo Mortensen), there’s The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and then there’s the dead world they walk upon.

This is a post-apocalyptic story with a difference. The difference is that there’s nothing cool or romantic about this devastated place where we spend two hours of our lives and the last days of humanity. Plenty of flicks have been set in some nebulous future setting where nuclear war, robots, a virus, melting icecaps, zombies, evolved monkeys or Michael Bay have been responsible for wiping out human civilisation as we knew it. In almost all of those stories, though, the world left behind might be seriously fucked up and rubble strewn, but there’s still life, of a sort, and as they say, where there’s life, there’s fucking. I mean, where there’s life there’s hope.

The Road posits a world where there will be no redemption, no Hand of God coming down from the heavens to save / kill us, no rebuilding, no preservation of a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz for future generations, no hope. The world is cold and getting colder, ashen, dead, really dead, and it’s just waiting for its last species to violently expire in order for the whole planet to become as quiet as a global grave can be.