All The Little Animals

All The Little Animals

The movie “All the Little Animals” is strangely not a children’s film, a cute animal film or a veterinarian story. Rather, it is a dark and insinuating fable. This may frustrate some viewers because it falls so far outside our usual story expectations, but it has an awful singleness of purpose that suggests deep Jungian origins. There could be something like that going on here, too: Like the 1989 phantom “Paperhouse,” it seems to be about more than we see.

Its principal character is Bobby (Christian Bale), 24, who suffered some brain damage in a childhood accident and is now slightly impaired and often afraid. Much of his fear is justified; his stepfather De Winter (Daniel Benzali) killed Bobby’s mother by “shouting her to death,” and now threatens him with commitment to a mental home unless he signs over control of the family’s London department store.

Bobby runs away. He hitches with a trucker who wants to kill a fox on the road. Bobby fights for the wheel, the truck rolls over, the driver dies, everything watched by a man standing beside the road. This is Mr. Summers (John Hurt), an intelligent recluse who lives in a cottage in the woods and devotes his life to burying dead animals. ”The car is a killing machine, pure and simple,” Mr. Summers says angrily; he even objects to the insects that die on windshields.

Who is this guy? What’s his story? Why does he have money? The movie becomes more interesting because it roots Mr. Summers in reality instead of making him into some kind of fairy-tale creature although he does heat Campbell’s soup for Bobby, give him a blanket and tell him he can stay overnight; there are no sexual undertones and this isn’t one of those movies where lonely men fall in love with boys just their age. Mr. Summers is matter of fact, reasonable and motivated entirely by his feelings about dead animals.

Bobby follows the man on his rounds, and then asks to stay and help. They go on some raids. One is a guerrilla attack on a lepidopterist, who has built a trap for moths in his backyard, and sips wine and listens to classical music while helpless creatures beat against nets around a bright light. ”Smash his light!” Mr. Summers spits, and Bobby lurches forward inelegantly with a rock to startle the smug bug collector.

Everything goes well until De Winter comes back into the picture; then Bobby and Mr. Summers tell each other their stories, and we learn that the movie is not simply a tale of good and evil, and that Mr. Summers is considerably more complicated than he first appears to be, especially after Summers (who looks kind of shabby) sneezes on De Winter’s exquisite suit and gets snot all over it:

The performances are watched very closely, and this makes the movie seem like a dream. Hurt builds Mr. Summers character by realistic details while Benzali makes De Winter appear as cold hearted control freak; he is the kind of villain that would shine in any thriller and save many others. What pushes him? Which reason is behind his hatred? Maybe he is pure evil and derives pleasure from performing malignant acts on daily basis. Obviously, anyone who has such tight control over their life lives in constant fear.

Now here’s a thought-provoking question: What does this film mean? It is not really about loving animals; it’s even disturbing that more attention is paid to dead creatures by Mr. Summers (and Bobby) than alive ones. Is it about death? Fear and how to overcome it? Revenge? The thing with archetypal stories is that they always look like they’re talking about something else entirely: Buried problems get acted out here one level beneath normal awareness.

Most movies have only got one side to them and let us know which right away. If this were treated as just another film, we’d see an insecure kid, a vicious stepfather, and a weirdo living in the woods played by some old coot with bushy eyebrows. However, “All the Little Animals” refuses to simplify its narrative into plain terms; what we can see happening seems more like surface indications of hidden depths below.

Even its ending which many will doubtlessly take for granted revenge carries an underground irony all its own.The director of this picture is Jeremy Thomas (also known as Lord Thomas), who produced many great British films during 1980s onward including Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), Manhunter (1986) and The Last Emperor (1987).

According to him ‘I was so struck by Walker Hamilton’s novel that I couldn’t help but make a movie about it’. And thank goodness he did there’s nothing like a good shadowy fear to make you think twice about sleeping with lights off for rest of your life.

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