Wildlife (2018)

Film: Wildlife (2018)
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ed Oxenbould, Bill Camp
Director: Paul Dano
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Literally every single year there are about a half dozen actors who take their first shot at the directing chair.  This is hardly a new thing.  Ever since Charlie Chaplin did it some hundred years ago, everyone from Orson Welles to Elaine May to Mel Gibson to Greta Gerwig has taken a shot at the director's chair with varying degrees of success.  2018 has been no exception (I'm even going to see Joel Edgerton's new movie immediately after writing this article), but I was thoroughly curious to see how Paul Dano would be as a director.  An actor that I admired, and have liked in the past (most notably in There Will Be Blood), his work since that picture has felt a bit bombastic as a performer, his instincts feeling too reliant on tics and indulgence than on something sturdy or subtle, which is more my speed.  Wildlife looked incredible in trailers, but I was genuinely curious to see what he'd make of Gyllenhaal and Mulligan, two of the best actors working but two that are chameleons that conform to their directors' visions.  Would Dano's styling as a director reflect his better or stranger instincts as an actor?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, based on the novel-of-the-same-name by Richard Ford (how is it possible that this is the first of Ford's novels to be brought to the big screen?), is about a young couple who have recently moved to the middle of nowhere (Great Falls, Montana), and are struggling with small town domesticity with their teenage son Joe (Oxenbould).  Jeannette (Mulligan) and Jerry (Gyllenhaal) are the sort of pair that feel thrust together by social pressure (it's never stated, but presumed that this young couple likely had a shotgun marriage of sorts with a son in his teens), and may have once had a strong relationship, but sex & ambition have been put to the wind, to the chagrin of Jeanette.  When Jerry loses his job and Jeanette starts providing for them, he can't handle it and then starts fighting fires in the Montana wilderness, putting his life at risk and abandoning Jeanette, who knows no one in the small town save her young son, whom she becomes reliant upon more as a friend than as his parent.  She starts an affair with one of her clients at the swimming pool named Warren (Camp), and clearly starts to lose her grasp on her sanity, while her son looks on in unnerving horror.  Eventually, Jerry returns and realizes that his marriage is over, with his wife leaving her son and husband to start a new life in Oregon.

My worries about Dano's direction were for naught-he finds a steady voice behind the camera in a way I don't think I've ever seen from him as an actor.  I loved some of the ways that he lets the most boisterous, staggering scenes of the film play out without embellishment or underlining.  Look at the way that Jeanette and Warren, after she gets drunk at a dinner, start making out with young Joe in clear sight of them, not judging anyone but letting your own sense of horror be the only judge in the room.  Dano's "show it as it is" sort of approach to Jeanette's breakdown allows for some really terrific acting from Mulligan.  I wouldn't say this is her best work in a while (because she's always good), but it's very atypical from the strong women we've seen her play recently.  Jeanette proves to be the character in the film we thought we could count on (stern, resilient), and then flounders under her loneliness and desperation as a woman who is approaching forty with no idea where her life will take her.  Gyllenhaal is also great as her husband, a man who must have shown such promise early in life but made the wrong decisions and couldn't learn to check his pride at "the way the world works" and as a result was never going to be invited into the club of success.

The film frequently feels, though, like Dano's too hands-off with the script.  His direction shows a great deal of care, but the story itself gets lost with his hands-off approach.  What is it, in fact, that Joe, our window into is parents' world, wants from this life?  We get few hints at his thoughts about the world around him, and as the film progresses it feels like a problem.  He doesn't have a great deal of friends, and feels like an underwritten weak link in the script.  This isn't Oxenbould's fault (he's very new to acting and shouldn't be expected to fill in the blanks the way his onscreen parents, both Oscar nominees, are able to do), but it makes the climactic scenes where he essentially confronts his father and then forgives him, knowing he's still a better choice for his future than his lost mother, feel less potent.  The movie is all delivery and can't quite get to the end in those final moments, but it shows a tremendous amount of promise from Dano as a director ((I'm in for his next movie), and is yet another look at why Mulligan & Gyllenhaal are two of the most interesting actors of their generation.