BDirected by Jeremiah Zagar Starring Evan Rosado, Raul Castillo, and Sheila Vand Review by Jon Kissel |  |
For his feature debut, Jeremiah Zagar embodies the independent cinema tradition of cribbing from Terence Malick, but with minority protagonists. Zagar’s film about a multi-racial family of five in upstate New York immediately evokes the Waco portions of Malick’s Tree of Life with its central family of three rambunctious boys, a gentle mother (Sheila Vand), and an unpredictable father (Raul Castillo). This strategy worked for David Gordon Green’s George Washington and it may very well work with Zagar, because his We the Animals is the work of a deep and promising filmmaker.
Adapted from a novel by Justin Torres, the film has a simple poeticism that immediately leaps off the screen. Youngest son Jonah (Evan Rosado), more sensitive than his older brothers (Josaih Gabriel and Isaiah Kristian) who form an exclusive, nearly psychic dyad, narrates in verse that is just intelligent enough to signify a gifted kid, but (mostly) not so smart that it becomes the overwrought musings of an adult who can’t find a child’s voice. Jonah’s early refrain of ‘we wanted more and we wanted less’ elegantly captures the rhythms of the family’s life, where the ‘more’ represents the volume and violence of free-range boys and the ‘less’ is the mandated peace and quiet the parents institute as they sleep during the day to cope with their night shifts. As the film goes on, Jonah’s brothers stop wanting less and give themselves over to a destructive masculinity, while dad wants more and more from his kids after his relationship with mom devolves into instability and abuse. Jonah, predisposed to wanting less, gets caught up in this change, unable to hang with his brothers’ rapid maturation or retard his growth and stay the sweet little boy his parents increasingly want him to be.
It wouldn’t be a Malick homage without ethereal sense memory, and this is Zagar’s greatest talent. We the Animals is a tactile film such that one can almost smell the air of the family’s house. The brothers play a game called ‘Body Heat’ where they huddle together under a blanket, chanting the game’s name and warming each other up. It’s an evocative and lived-in detail that works every time it comes up. If part of cinematic sense memory is the witnessing of a moment when a character is imprinting on a specific feeling, then the betrayals ring out as loud as the intimacies. A sequence of dad teaching Jonah to swim is masterful, where the father is carrying his son in his arms in a lake, and then abruptly dropping him to force him to support himself. That presence followed by a surprise absence is succinct in a way that the scene contains no dialogue, outside of the giant fight it provokes in mom and dad when the family gets back home. Zagar packs We the Animals with scenes just like these, such that the meta picture of the film could be an adult Jonah reminiscing on his childhood and filtering out the instances he remembers the clearest.
The frayed relationship between Jonah’s parents never moves from his eyes and perception to theirs, and it takes up a good portion of his mental real estate. Mom works in a bottling plant and dad does overnight security, jobs that pay the bills but only when both are in play. Jonah experiences the family’s finances through the absence of one of those incomes and the hurting it puts on the cupboards and the fridge, in addition to witnessing the despair of poverty, or dangling on its precipice, in the strain it puts on his parents. The boys can live in the immediate, but the parents have to consider the future’s tenuousness and compromise. Given her druthers, mom might get rid of dad altogether when he erupts in violence, but then, she needs him and his income in the house, so her personal safety is exchanged for economic security. Castillo plays the role with enough charisma to not make this a wholly hateful decision, but his return lingers like a sickly sweet fog in the house, an ostensible good that has been transmuted into something darker.
The style of We the Animals has been locked down since Days of Heaven in the late 70’s, if not earlier, and future imitators get by on the strength or meaning found in the margins. Zagar includes many visceral moments and makes the film into a worthy imitator, though he’s not as strong when exploring Jonah’s burgeoning sexuality and occasionally loses Jonah’s voice in the narration. This is a promising debut that finds new ways into a tried-and-true cinematic path, and one that hopefully prompts more from Zagar instead of less. B
It wouldn’t be a Malick homage without ethereal sense memory, and this is Zagar’s greatest talent. We the Animals is a tactile film such that one can almost smell the air of the family’s house. The brothers play a game called ‘Body Heat’ where they huddle together under a blanket, chanting the game’s name and warming each other up. It’s an evocative and lived-in detail that works every time it comes up. If part of cinematic sense memory is the witnessing of a moment when a character is imprinting on a specific feeling, then the betrayals ring out as loud as the intimacies. A sequence of dad teaching Jonah to swim is masterful, where the father is carrying his son in his arms in a lake, and then abruptly dropping him to force him to support himself. That presence followed by a surprise absence is succinct in a way that the scene contains no dialogue, outside of the giant fight it provokes in mom and dad when the family gets back home. Zagar packs We the Animals with scenes just like these, such that the meta picture of the film could be an adult Jonah reminiscing on his childhood and filtering out the instances he remembers the clearest.
The frayed relationship between Jonah’s parents never moves from his eyes and perception to theirs, and it takes up a good portion of his mental real estate. Mom works in a bottling plant and dad does overnight security, jobs that pay the bills but only when both are in play. Jonah experiences the family’s finances through the absence of one of those incomes and the hurting it puts on the cupboards and the fridge, in addition to witnessing the despair of poverty, or dangling on its precipice, in the strain it puts on his parents. The boys can live in the immediate, but the parents have to consider the future’s tenuousness and compromise. Given her druthers, mom might get rid of dad altogether when he erupts in violence, but then, she needs him and his income in the house, so her personal safety is exchanged for economic security. Castillo plays the role with enough charisma to not make this a wholly hateful decision, but his return lingers like a sickly sweet fog in the house, an ostensible good that has been transmuted into something darker.
The style of We the Animals has been locked down since Days of Heaven in the late 70’s, if not earlier, and future imitators get by on the strength or meaning found in the margins. Zagar includes many visceral moments and makes the film into a worthy imitator, though he’s not as strong when exploring Jonah’s burgeoning sexuality and occasionally loses Jonah’s voice in the narration. This is a promising debut that finds new ways into a tried-and-true cinematic path, and one that hopefully prompts more from Zagar instead of less. B
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