Mark Reviews Movies: WILDLIFE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 1, 2018

It takes a lot of work to maintain a romance, a marriage, a family, and/or a sense of self-worth, but it doesn't take much lose faith in any one of those things. That simple tragedy is at the heart of Wildlife, co-writer/director Paul Dano's debut film, based on Richard Ford's novel. It tells the story of a seemingly happy and sturdy family that comes apart when the husband loses his job. There's more to the sudden fall and gradual dissolution of the family than a single event, and that's what Dano and Zoe Kazan's screenplay examines in thorough and depressing fashion.

When we first meet the Brinsons, they have recently moved to a small town in Montana. Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), the husband and father, is a golf pro at a local country club. His wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) is a homemaker who stopped working when, according to her, she and her husband decided it was better for her to stay home with their son. The son is Joe (Ed Oxenbould), a teenager who doesn't need the constant presence of his mother and probably hasn't in a long time.

That's one crack in the façade of this family, perhaps, because, as happy as they may seem, there's a decided sense that Jeanette is not fully a part of this trio. She's inside cooking, while Jerry and his son throw a football in the front yard. She's busy with the dishes, while Joe gets help from his father with his homework. The men have something to do—work and school—for most of the day, and we might be wondering what Jeanette does with most of her day, aside from ensuring that there's food in the fridge, dinner on the table, and clean dishes for the next day. At a certain point, we learn that she has been thinking about her role in the family and the world for a while now, too.

It's not that the men are oblivious or dismissive of Jeanette. Joe's a good kid, attentive to his parents' feelings and wishes. Jerry seems content with his life and appreciative of his wife. There are no complaints or sighs or side glances when she asks for his help with the dishes, and Joe watches with no secret admiration as his parents canoodle over the kitchen sink.

The story is set in 1960, and for all intents and purposes, the Brinsons look like a model family—like the subjects of some idealized Norman Rockwell painting brought to life. Whatever might be going on in the world is of little matter to them. They skip the television (which is on the fritz) and spend their evenings listening to whatever football game is on the radio.

Dano and Kazan spend just enough time with this family at their apparent peak. We have to see that, if only so we can appreciate the drama of their fall. There's more to it, though, because the film is also about how that picture-perfect life was held together with nothing more than belief and trust among them, as well as their respective belief in themselves.

Jerry's fired. Jeanette encourages him to find a new job, but not any job will do for her husband, whose previous job troubles have sent the family packing before. His pride has been wounded, and he becomes a shell of his self-professedly personable self, sleeping on the couch or in the car outside a local bar. Jeanette goes looking for work, despite her husband's protests, and even Joe gets a job to help.

A wildfire is blazing on the outskirts of town. For some unknowable reason, after turning down safer jobs and even his old one at the country club, Jerry decides—suddenly and completely on his own—to join the crew fighting the fire.

When he leaves, everything about the family is shattered. Jeanette spends the day Jerry leaves in bed, but she wakes up with a renewed sense of purpose. Jerry didn't count on himself or his family to get through this rough patch, and she's not going to count on him anymore. Instead, she focuses almost exclusively on herself, leaving Joe to tend to himself and the home, while watching as his mother goes through a long-delayed identity crisis. Part of it involves a new friend named Warren (Bill Camp), who owns a car dealership.

This is a fairly simple story, but the point of explicating it to such an extent is to note just how attuned the film is to the details of these characters and these relationships. Nothing that happens comes as much of a surprise, because Dano and Kazan provide us with the undercurrents of discontent, resentment, and failed promises without us fully noticing them. That's not the same, mind you, as saying that the story doesn't have an impact.

It does, because of the attention to detail in the screenplay and within the performances. Gyllenhaal's Jerry, of course, disappears for most of the film once he's off to fight the fire, but he leaves an impression as a loving father, a once-faithful husband, and a man whose stubbornness leads him to forget part of himself. Oxenbould gives a solid performance as a kid who quickly learns more about his parents and the world than he rather would at this age, trying to hold the separated family together and finding that increasingly difficult. The strongest performance and character, though, is Mulligan as Jeanette, whose seemingly overnight transformation into an independent, attempting to find her way as such, feels as if it has been a long time coming for her.

Dano has made a fine first film, a quiet and restrained study and dissection of domesticity. Wildlife is observant of and compassionate about how the little things both kept these characters together and wedge them apart.

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