December 17, 2018 3 min to read

Wildlife

At times, Dano’s movie is a “tough sit”. But he and Kazan are so careful with their characters that Mulligan’s brilliance shines through, and the most important scenes stick in your memory.

by Zach Saul

The Brinsons are a recently uprooted family trying to make it work it 1960s Montana. Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) works at the local golf club schmoozing the town big wigs and shining their shoes. Since his wife Jeanne (Carey Mulligan) is a stay at home mom, all hell breaks loose when Jerry loses his job and the family has to figure out another way to make ends meet. Jeanne takes a job teaching swimming at the local YMCA, and their son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) takes a job working at a photography studio much to the chagrin of his patriarchal father. As tensions broil in the Brinson house and Jerry grows increasingly detached, embarrassed, and angry he decided to take a job fighting fires and abandons his family. Once Jerry leaves, we mostly see things from Joe’s perspective, and follow the increasingly erratic behavior of his mother who’s desperately searching for companionship, stability and some sense of identity.

Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan’s Wildlife is a requiem of a divorce and what a splintering marriage is like for a child watching helplessly in agony. Joe is literally being pulled in two directions by his erratic parents, and both use him as an excuse to justify their behavior with little to no regard for his feelings. What makes Wildlife more interesting that a typical divorce story though isn’t Joe’s plight - but Jeanne’s. Mulligan’s character struggles mightily with what her life is going to become after her estranged husband left her, and this leads her to have an excruciating affair with Warren Miller (Bill Camp) in front of her son. Mulligan doesn’t feel at all like a damsel in distress, despite everything in her environment leading us to believe she might be. Instead, when her husband Jerry leaves we meet a female firecracker, who’s splintering bravado hints at an identity that was always bubbling beneath the surface. Her job and her newfound sexual freedom are enthralling and terrifying for her - but Jeanne realizes having agency in her own life is essential to her.

Dano’s direction through all of Joe’s parents transgressions is shockingly restrained. Even Jerry, the character we’re least likely to empathize with is humanized by the end of the movie as he too has his moment of fiery weakness tossing gasoline on Warren Miller’s porch. However when he sees Mr. Miller run out of his house with another woman - it felt as though in that moment he grasped the absurdity of his family’s predicament. When Jerry saw even his wife’s supposed “better life” was falling apart, his anger subsided.

The Good: Wildlife may not win best picture, but in my humble opinion it has the best performance an Actress has given this year, and we can go ahead and fit Carey Mulligan for her tiarra now. Her performance as Jeanne is equal parts sensitive, creepy, unhinged, and brave. Mulligan works hard to keep her performance “buttoned up” throughout the movie, and not give the audience signs of splintering until she absolutely has to. Her restraint makes the emotional climaxes in Wildlife stunning - and by far the most memorable by an actress in 2018.

The Bad: I don’t have much to complain about - but Wildlife has a “formalness” to it that’s hard to put your finger on. I think the movie is held back from having the impact it could have had because there’s a few moments the dialogue feels stale. The interactions between Jerry and Jeanne in particular stand out to me. All of the relationships in Wildlife are rich, complicated, and nuanced—except for the dynamic between husband and wife. I would have enjoyed knowing more about the unravelling of Jerry & Jeanne’s marriage by getting an understanding of what it was like when things were good—not just what it looked like when it fell apart.