Somber insight into the architecture of simple family life endangereed.
Wildlife
Grade: B
Director: Paul Dano
Screenplay: Dano, Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks), based on the novel by Richard Ford
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal (The Sister Brothers), Carey Mulligan (Never Let Me Go)
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hr 45 min
By: John DeSando
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.” Oscar Wilde
At holiday time, you might elect to wait until after Christmas to see this melancholy, at times melodramatic, drama about a 1960’s family on the cusp of change. While it is expertly directed and partially written by neophyte Paul Dano, it is a low-key, depressing depiction of a wife, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), ready to connect three years in the future with The Feminine Mystique.
Yes, she is what you would expect of a late ‘50’s housewife: happy, subservient, loving, regretful. She regrets her indolent husband, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is affable enough but can’t keep a job. She loves her 14-year-old son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), who observes the disconnect between parents and her mother’s inevitable infidelity in her father’s protracted absence.
Because the film is largely through Joe’s point of view, this sometimes-melodramatic drama has a fresh perspective—the point of view of a child who witnesses the disintegration of his parents’ love and his family unit. Dano essentially is directing a character much like his film persona: quiet, thoughtful, perplexed, and wary of the adult world. Joe’s quiet insights anchor the film in realism and sympathy, helped enormously by Oxenbould’s intensity and calm.
Besides the meticulous set design of the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s, Dano and fellow writers, inspired by novelist Richard Ford (who often depicts Great Falls, Montana), capture the anxieties of rural America at that time (assassinations and full force Viet Nam imminent) and the incipient feminist movement waiting like Jeanette to burst forth with fury.
Although dialogue from Jeanette and Jerry is spare and low-key, Dano has infused the film with a knowing melancholy to make the audience aware that familial fragmentation comes not just at Thanksgiving but anywhere, anytime, even in remote Montana.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
