Animals

Animals

When it comes to drug addicts, they’re all the same at the end of the day no matter what their background is. Anybody who’s known an addict has watched as that person’s personality becomes subsumed by his or her habit, turning a unique human being’s individual story into something predictable, obvious and clichéd. It’s heart-wrenching for friends and family, who ask themselves what happened to their sweet daughter or their promising son.

That’s the hard part about stories involving drug addicts: There aren’t a million different ones; there are really only a few because the addiction itself works like clockwork. So many movies have charted trips down this rabbit hole, from “Lost Weekend” to “Panic in Needle Park” to “Drugstore Cowboy” to “Requiem for a Dream.” They can serve as cautionary tales or they can be queasily voyeuristic and sensational. Collin Schiffli’s strong directorial debut, “Animals,” (with a script by David Dastmalchian, who also stars) isn’t either one of those things.

It follows a young couple whose last remaining connection is their heroin use when they can afford it and when their money-making plots start to evaporate, reality slams shut on them.

Jude (Dastmalchian) and his girlfriend Bobbie (Kim Shaw), hanging out in Chicago, sleeping in their car, looking for dope the zoo! But first seem like an adorable rom-com version of drug addicts at first. They hold hands as they walk down the street. She keeps all her possessions in a child’s metal lunch box. They go to the zoo together and look at lions and camels and tigers through the bars of the cage.

(The animal thing is super-thick with meaning here although it does lead to one of those final shots that makes you gasp both because it’s so strange and so beautiful.) They’re not in touch with any of their family members anymore. Calling home for help is off the table. The landscape of their lives has been reduced to such a barren plain that there’s only room for each other, and for the drugs.

This ain’t no slippery slope movie, like other stories about addicts; in “Animals,” they’re already at the bottom. It takes place over a very short period of time, but there is an alarming (and effective) shift in mood from the nearly bucolic first half hour or so (blinking into the camera flares of morning light, laughing together after a successful con, luxuriating in the heroin high itself) to a more jagged and terrifying energy as it rolls toward its end.

Bobbie and Jude shoplift CDs to sell for drugs, with Bobbie acting as a prostitute who arranges “dates” through a newspaper ad that she and Jude run. They eventually con a security guard over a fake stolen laptop in a scheme so convoluted it nearly rivals Moses and Addie Pray’s money trick in “Paper Moon,” but the cons only get more dangerous from there. An addiction is an animal that needs to be fed, and without fixes constantly throughout the day, it gets ravenous (just in case you missed all the roaring-lion and scratching-gorilla imagery).

Schiffli and cinematographer Larkin Donley shoot “Animals” in Chicago, using the city’s unmistakable urban landscape to stunning effect. Bobbie and Jude live everywhere and nowhere: Down in the Loop or Lincoln Park, Wrigleyville or elsewhere, where life is social bustling crowded; they walk around on the fringes of all that, huddled in empty spaces between cracks. They stroll along the lakefront stepping over sunbathers; they try to score drugs on what appear to be emptied out outskirts of the city where avenues are wide and deserted Chicago looks practically unpopulated except for them two, which is about right for this self-absorbed world of drugs.

John Heard has a nice cameo as security guard who befriends Bobbie in a way that actually gets through to her; his kindness comes with no strings and no judgment. The movie isn’t particularly flashy-looking Donley responds well to striking contrasts between bleak empty lots with gleaming skyline beyond; he has different moods and shapes (Jude lying long flat sick hospital bed with blue flat line of Lake Michigan out window being one); it’s very pretty looking film.

“Animals” is very open about Bobbie and Jude’s middle-class background. One scene has Jude reciting all of his privileges, showing that he knows where he falls on the fortunate side of things in society. It’s not a bulwark against drug addiction but being born lucky can certainly help soften the blow when everything goes to hell. Judd’s teeth are rotting out of his head, Bobbie can feel her breast throbbing with pain, Judd can’t poop for days on end. And yet the middle class well fed glow still shimmers off them both like a memory: Animals, in other words.

There are two things that make “Animals” work; the first is the performances by its two leads and the symbiotic relationship they have formed between them. Both actors manage to dimly suggest that once upon a time like light from a star long extinct Bobbie and Jude were cute together.

They’ve been through a lot. They aren’t so far gone that their moral compasses have stopped spinning entirely around themselves like tops; indeed, in one magnificent scene where they’re both jittery mouthed from withdrawal sitting on a park bench deciding whether or not to demand money from some woman rocking a baby stroller nearby it becomes clear just how much love there still is between these people who should hate each other’s guts: “Tell her you’ll stick her baby,” says Bobbie (her face practically melting right off her skull as she realizes what she’s saying), “she’ll give you anything then.”

But just as quickly as this beautiful moment arrives does it leave again ugly, terrible, real never really having been there at all save for those few brief seconds when everything seemed possible: “I couldn’t go through with it,” informs Jude (getting back into the car), “I didn’t want you to,” replies Bobbie (bursting into tears).

It’s these tiny little bits (and there are so many of them scattered throughout the movie) that help to make what is otherwise an average story memorable if not altogether unique. It’s not particularly interesting because drug addicts, for the most part, tend to be very boring but it sure is fun watching these two actors play off each other.

Watch Animals For Free On Gomovies.