Where the wild things draw
Racing, clawing, screaming, drumming, dreaming their way through an impoverished childhood are three young boys at the center of Jeremiah Zagar’s heartfelt but lacking film We the Animals.
Based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Justin Torres, Zagar’s film locates its heart, its head, and its attitude squarely with Jonah, played by Evan Rosado. As the youngest of three boys, Jonah prefers drawing to fighting, and dreaming to adolescent scheming. In upstate New York, where Jonah and his brothers play out their childhoods, dangerous overpasses become impromptu playgrounds, and wild runs through the woods can take up whole afternoons. TV, video games, even radios are nowhere to be found. These are semi-feral boys left to their own devices for long periods of time.
Late at night, after his brothers have drifted off to sleep, Jonah takes out used school notebook pages and draws his impressions of, and his feelings for his world. Animator Mark Samsonovich chooses bold crayon colors animated coarsely over random scrawls to introduce us to Jonah’s rich inner life, one which he keep from his older brothers Joel (Josiah Gabriel) and Manny (Isaiah Christian). Zagar and casting director Ann Goulder auditioned over 5000 boys to find non-actors who could naturally portray the volatility and camaraderie of boyhood.
Poverty and its well-known dangers provide the dramatic foundation of conflict, which arrives quickly enough in the form of Paps (Raul Castillo), who approaches life sleepily until awoken into a fierce anger, and approaches fatherhood with hopes of having an extended party with his boys, until of course the money runs out. Ma (played with a bit too much tragic silence by Shelia Vand), as per usual in this kind of a story, has the impossible job of caring for her brood.
What transpires is a coming of age story spiced liberally with unemployment, male anger, female angst, and, through it all, a little boy who fills page after page with increasingly fantastic and surreal imagery.
In one inexplicably effective scene, Paps, driven into a rage by his desperate situation, digs a hole in the backyard that looks suspiciously like a grave. Will it be his final resting place? Cinematographer Zack Mulligan chooses to linger on the faces of those trying to make sense of his actions. Ma is horrified. The boys, wary but curious as kittens, cannot contain their curiosity, and inch ever closer to the hole. After Pa loses interest, the hole fills with rain water, and Jonah finds solace in the cool comfort of a blanket of mud. His reverie takes him on an imaginative flight above his house and high over the surrounding forest before he’s snapped back to reality by this brothers. Pits of despair can free us as well as constrain us.
As Jonah moves through his childhood, filled as much by brotherly love as neighborhood dangers, we see a world rich in color and motion and light and action, but peopled by individuals who are as distant and unknowable as they are exotic.
Zagan and screenwriter Daniel Kitrosser wisely choose physical expression, usually accompanied with boyish exuberance, over pages of dialog. The effect leads us to affinities with the boys, and shared confusions in the seemingly illogical fights and later makeup passion of their parents.
Yet the film can’t seem to figure out what it wants to say, instead assuming that life itself provides enough drama, and asks us to believe that the power of art honestly made can overcome any practical or economic limitation.
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We the Animals opens today in select Bay Area theaters.
https://youtu.be/VXLUBQ0lW8g
