We the Animals (2018)

Film: We the Animals (2018)
Stars: Evan Rosado, Raul Castillo, Sheila Vand, Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Gabriel
Director: Jeremiah Zagar
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Terrence Malick is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers.  We've talked about him a lot on this blog, so you might already know this, but if you weren't aware he's one of my absolute favorites, and I never miss one of his movies (unless they're only playing at a zoo an hour away where I have to pay a $35 admission to get in...Voyage of Time, looking at you).  But what I've never really had an appetite for is the filmmakers who are clearly borrowing from Malick's distinctive look.  Perhaps because they don't have his same approach or his same tech crew, whenever someone tries to be Malick in films such as Ain't Them Bodies Saints or The Better Angels it never comes across properly on the screen.  I had no idea that We the Animals would be attempting a similar motif, but with scattershot visuals of a young man's childhood combined with sparse dialogue and narration, it's clear that Malick was on director Jeremiah Zagar's mind when he made We the Animals.  Thankfully for me, while this isn't approaching Malick at his best (few things are), it's the highest-quality tribute I've seen to his style since he reemerged on the scene with The New World and The Tree of Life.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around three young men named Jonah (Rosado), Manny (Kristian), and Joel (Gabriel), all of whom live with a Puerto Rican father (Castillo) and Italian-American mother (Vand).  The boys are indistinguishable from each other at first, and create a bond as they witness their father's abusive relationship with their deeply-depressed mother, resulting in severe neglect of the three sons, who resort to petty crime just to feed themselves.  However, as the film progresses we see Jonah strike out differently from the other boys, being a young gay man rather than straight as his brothers appear to be, and is obsessed with a slacker blond teenager who lives on a nearby farm.  Unable to speak about his feelings to his brothers or to his dysfunctional parents, he retreats into a world of his own drawings, sketching increasingly violent and sexual artwork that he hides inside of his mattress.

The film's climax is when Jonah kisses the teenager he had a crush on, and then in a state of euphoria comes home to find that his brothers have shown his parents the drawings he has hidden under his bed.  Jonah is irate, ripping up the drawings as his parents stand there, aghast and confused and acting as if they have been living with a stranger.  It works particularly well since there's a rampant hypocrisy here-earlier in the film we see the father and mother (I don't believe they ever get names) bad mouth each other to young Jonah, treating him as a sounding board for their complicated lives, but this young man having something secret appears unforgivable to them.  It's a smart observation by Zagar of the expectations that come when some LGBT people come out-they are blamed not for who they are, but for making the lives of those around them more complicated.

Rosado is great as Jonah, and Castillo (best known for his work on HBO's Looking) is equally as good as his father.  The film's camerawork is sometimes revolutionary (the firing of the dad in the parking lot was gorgeous and a great juxtaposition to everyone onscreen's life falling apart), though occasionally it feels like it's treading the same ground without purpose, and the drawing gimmick feels less magical when you realize they are literal and not figurative/future drawings from the narrator.  But overall while it's a small movie, it's an effective one, and one that I haven't been able to escape in my memory in the week since I saw it (and I've seen loads of movies since).  If you're still pulling together your year-end lists, it's worth checking this out before you finish.