Review: We the Animals

Both powerful and frustrating in equal measure, the provocative and evocative coming of age drama We the Animals boasts a wealth of cinematic style and a long list of culturally relevant topics that it wants to talk about. It’s ambitious and made with the best of intentions, but also rigid, inorganic, and always in danger of talking down to audiences that it’s seeking to uplift, comfort, and educate. The narrative feature debut of documentarian and short filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar presents itself as a raw, unvarnished look growing up in a lower middle class, ethnically diverse family in small town Pennsylvania, but it’s also a film so intently focused on looking like a polished American independent production that it unwittingly ends up feeling phony and hollow at its worst points. There’s enough merit here to warrant some amount of recommendation, but it’s also the definition of a mixed bag.

Adapted from Justin Torres 2011 novel of the same name and set sometime in the 1990s, We the Animals is told primarily from the viewpoint of Jonah (Evan Rosado), who’s introduced to the audience just prior to his tenth birthday. He lives in a relatively non-descript suburban American town with his Puerto Rican father (Raúl Castillo), white ex-New Yorker mother (Sheila Vand), and brothers Manny (Isaiah Kristian) and Joel (Josiah Gabriel), both of whom are in their early teens. The relationship between mother, who works the night shift at a bottling plant, and their frequently unemployed father has become strained and abusive. The parents will violently fight, dad will leave for long stretches of time while they cool off, mom will fall into a deep depression where she can’t get out of bed, and the kids are largely left to their own devices. Daddy usually returns from his sojourns, and things will return to normal, but the constant cycle of abuse is taking a massive toll on the family. Older brothers Manny and Joel start taking after their tough-talking irresponsible daddy’s worst impulses to survive and amuse themselves, while young Jonah takes a more soulful and artistic approach, losing himself in his writing and drawings.

Zagar and co-writer Dan Kitrosser, a frequent playwright, have crafted an excellent screenplay for We the Animals, making the material the film’s strongest asset. The situations and moments that comprise We the Animals will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has grown up misunderstood and in an unhappy home. By depicting formative moments of growing up, intense everyday struggles for survival, and the aftermath of spousal abuse through the eyes of shy, sensitive Jonah, Zagar and Kitrosser create indelible set pieces. From moment to moment, the words and emotions being expressed by their material come with an undeniable amount of power, grace, and empathy. Whether Jonah is forced into watching porn in a friend’s basement or he’s helping his brothers rip off a convenience store just so they can eat, Zagar and Kitrosser treat such emotionally intense sequences with a sense of authenticity.

That dedication to emotional realism is helped greatly by the trio of young, first time performers given the immense task of playing the leads (although Gabriel has worked with his director and co-writer on two shorts made the same year as this feature). We the Animals is depicted from the point of view of a young man who doesn’t want to become as hardened and cynical as his parents and older brothers. That fight to maintain a sense of humanity is brilliantly conveyed by Rosado, who also functions as the film’s narrator. While Jonah is a withdrawn young man, for understandable reasons, Rosado’s work is commanding, touching, and remarkably assured, especially when one notes that it comes from someone who’s never starred in a film before. The written material might be strong on the page, but it takes a special group of young performers to make it come to life, and Zagar couldn’t ask for better collaborators than the ones he has here.

The film’s depiction of the various ways that emotional, psychological, and physical abuse can infect all members of a family is harrowing, truthful, and unvarnished. Beatings and ear-splitting shouting matches don’t happen every day for this family, but the effects of any one of the many incidents can linger for weeks and months at a time. There are flashes of tenderness and love, but none of these characters are ever able to shake the fact that they’re all in a desperate situation. Zagar’s depiction of spousal abuse takes on an emotional ripple effect, and the writer-director tackles the subject with nuance and care, but never with rose-coloured gentility. While the kids are surviving in the wake of their parents’ dysfunction, they’re also in danger of becoming somewhat feral and violent. Showing abusive tendencies as a sort of learned behaviour is tricky to do without lapsing into unsubtle theatricality or shorthand, but some of the best moments in We the Animals are simple, fleeting scenes where Jonah’s brothers are put in their place for echoing their father’s worst impulses.

While the handling of abuse in the film’s strongest moments is something to be commended, We the Animals becomes somewhat undercut by a late film detour into an examination of Jonah’s budding sexuality. While it’s admirably unflinching and boundary pushing to look into the sexual maturation of a pre-teen boy, Zagar and Kitrosser never find a way to build to such revelations organically, with the shift in focus coming across more like a plot twist and less like a life altering event. Although the viewer spends plenty of time with Jonah’s words and sketches (which come to life via frequent, animated interludes), none of these developments are convincingly built. It’s the kind of film that starts off saying one thing quite well, but suddenly decides to abandon most of its set up in favour of tackling another fraught subject. It’s not that this swerve into different material feels emotionally or narratively incorrect, but that Zagar never finds a way to properly pivot or integrate such material assuredly.

But the biggest demerit for We the Animals isn’t the turn in the material, but in its stifling, sometimes annoying visual construction. While comparisons between We the Animals and Sean Baker’s recent critical darling The Florida Project are perhaps inevitable and unavoidable, Zagar’s work is more indebted to Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 fantastical drama Beasts of the Southern Wild. I don’t mean this as a compliment. Zeitlin’s grainy and gritty film purported to celebrate the gumption and backbone of impoverished southerners, but it ended up unwittingly celebrating poverty and hardship as a life defining choice that builds character and not scarring trauma. Zagar falls into a similar trap here by offering the viewer unrealistically and rigidly constructed visuals that try so desperately to seem lived in that they come across as phony reconstructions of events instead of the real deal. It’s a film that wants to be gritty and real, but also romantic and nostalgic. None of these are settings that go together particularly well, and it takes a filmmaker with a much more seasoned resume than Zagar’s to pull it off.

Zagar’s focus on primal emotions and individual memories works well, but he’s clearly more enamoured with form and function. Shooting with a blend of grainy 16mm film stock and brief digital flourishes, Zagar isn’t approximating memory or trauma, but crafting something that will never be mistaken for anything other than a fence swinging movie. Every image and sequence might be well written and performed, but they’re staged so inorganically that they often come across as hopelessly phony. It’s as polished as supposedly gritty filmmaking gets, all set to a grating, obtrusive, and percussive electronic musical score that distracts instead of enhances.

There’s a moment where the young boys are travelling in the cab of a pick-up truck, and one of them seizes the camera in his hands to place the focus on himself. In theory, the shot that results looks great. In practice, such a fourth-wall breaking moment is insulting to the very people who might be moved by such material. Such a shot reminds viewers that they’re watching a fictionalized movie and not a documentary, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the tone and tenor of We the Animals is so purposefully serious that such moments smack of amateurish posturing and not accomplished, fully realized filmmaking.

But while the style of We the Animals is irksome and problematic, the themes and ideas are all on point. Although it’s set over twenty years ago, Zagar’s film remains a pointed parable for our current era. It’s uniquely American in its depiction of a semi-devout, multi-cultural, morally fluid family that’s capable of forgiving certain transgressions while punishing others in perpetuity. If Zagar was able to more properly and effectively marry his artistic instincts and storytelling chops, We the Animals would have been a much better film. Instead, it’s a frustratingly off kilter exercise that still has plenty to recommend within its all-too-neatly drawn margins.

We the Animals opens exclusively at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on Friday, August 24, 2018. It expands to Vancity Theatre in Vancouver on August 31, Montreal (Cinema du Parc) and Kingsway Theatre and Carlton Cinemas in Toronto on September 7, Ottawa (Mayfair Theatre), Calgary (Plaza Theatre), and Victoria (Vic Theatre) on September 14, Edmonton (Princess Theatre) on September 21, and Regina (Golden Mile) and Saskatoon (Roxy) on September 21.

Check out the trailer for We the Animals: