August 30, 2010 03:00PM EDT

Best in Show: Jacki Weaver

The Australian crime thriller Animal Kingdom is starting small but its lead actress, a "national treasure," is already big Down Under.

Animal Kingdom, the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury winner, is now playing on 39 of the nation's screens. Let that be 39 steps closer to an Oscar nomination for Jacki Weaver; it could happen if Academy members actually see the acclaimed crime thriller. But let’s not jump ahead of the narrative. An Oscar nomination would be a deserving climax, but it’s not exactly a prologue. If Animal Kingdom’s confident storytelling teaches us anything, it’s to stay focused and earn your dramatic developments.



We hear Janine “Smurf” Cody (Weaver) before we see her. Her introduction comes over the telephone in the film’s very first scene. Her grandson J (James Frecheville) sits dead-eyed beside his mother watching television. He makes two phone calls: one to Australia’s 911 (his mother has overdosed) and the other to his grandmother. It’s instantly clear from their conversation that they aren’t close—“Do you remember where we live?”—but that the grandmother is still a source of comfort. She veritably purrs on the phone. She’ll "take care of everything, Sweetie."

When Smurf scoops J up from his broken home, we meet her in the flesh. She’s a small unassuming thing, always ready with words of comfort and terms of endearment. She takes J home to live with her and his uncles. Her home, as it turns out, is a veritable crime den, and she its accommodating den mother. Smurf fawns and coos and kisses her boys so incessantly that it’s half surprising to be continually confronted with the visual evidence that they aren’t little boys at all. Her sons are all full-grown men. Even J, the teenager, towers over her.



The reasonable viewer is immediately predisposed to grant this cheerful matriarch the benefit of the doubt: Maybe she’s purposefully naïve about the crime world orbiting her? But in one of the film’s smartest moves, no dramatic reveal follows. We realize quickly, but organically, that she’s fully complicit. As the lens tightens on this family and various characters begin to fall away, Weaver’s fascinating sly turn takes center stage. Even when Smurf is offscreen, we’re flies in her web; she hums pleasantly as she pins us there. Weaver’s devious performance is terrifically consistent, but we only begin to fully understand it as the plot turns; her perpetually wide-eyed stare betrays her. Weaver’s enormous scary orbs are windows not to the soul, but to soullessness.

In an earlier interview here at Tribeca Film, her co-star Ben Mendelsohn and director David Michôd referred to the actress as a “national treasure.” Unable to shake her astonishing performance, I called on an Australian friend to elaborate. He was obviously a fan, and seconded the compliment. He recounted her key turns in seminal Australian films like Caddie and Picnic at Hanging Rock and explained that she’d recently been away from the movie screens for well over a decade before returning for an attention-grabbing cameo in Three Blind Mice last year.



He imagined that this hypnotic comeback in Animal Kingdom is rather like how American moviegoers may have felt when Ellen Burstyn’s genius came back into sharp shocking focus in Requiem for a Dream (2000). That brave star turn famously and deservedly led to an Oscar nomination. This one should, too. The sooner we can start calling Jacki Weaver an “international” treasure, the better.

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Click the poster to find movie times near you for Animal Kingdom: