Dano and Kazan
move the answer to the 1960s, and it's not an encouraging answer. Carey Mulligan
plays Jeanette, a 34 year old mother of a 14 year old boy, Joe (Ed Oxenbould).
She's a housewife who works hard to fit the role and always stay positive.
She's married to Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), a friendly guy who tries to use his
charm to make up for his questionable work ethic and inability to follow the
rules. He's a stubborn man whose pride gets in his way. This has caused the
family to move several times over the years as he hunts for employment. The
movie begins at a turning point. Joe has just moved the family to a small
Montana town and gets fired from the golf pro job that brought him there.
Despite other offers, Jerry decides that his only option is to take a job
fighting the wildfires far, far outside of town. It's a dangerous job, especially
for someone inexperienced like himself, and it means that he has to disappear
for weeks. He makes this decision abruptly and unilaterally.
This breaks
Jeanette. Instead of being distraught by his absence or pretending like
everything is normal, as soon as Joe leaves, she snaps into her default mode:
she starts living her life like she's in a RomCom. Except, she's in the Hope Floats/How
Stella Got Her Groove Back
RomCom. She starts taking control of her life, not living it for someone else.
She acts impetuously and stops playing nice.
Only, there's one
problem: she's still the mother of a 14 year old. In fact, Wildlife is
told from Joe's perspective, not Jeanette's, and that makes it a deeply
uncomfortable movie. Because, in Joe's eyes, his father just left him for a
dangerous job, and his mother has abandoned any pretense of taking care of
him. It's never entirely clear how common this is for him. I suspect that
Jeanette has always been a little more frank than the idealized 60s housewife she
nearly pulls off early in the movie, but she's never swung this much. Joe's
reaction to it doesn't quite match up with her ease with the change.
Ed Oxenbould is a
fantastic observer in the movie. He drives very little of the story. This is by
design. He's not Jay Gatsby. He's Nick Carraway. (It's funny that I thought of
that comparison, given Mulligan's connection to it.) Oxenbould
reacts to everything really well. He's able to convey confusion, fear, and
anger without saying much. I could see in his eyes how he's processing events
as they are happening. Carey Mulligan is the star of the movie, as the parent
who is around the whole time. She's so good at the perfect housewife facade
early on, that it's jarring when she drops it later. He actions seem frantic
only because the movie is following Joe, not her the whole time. Had the movie
followed her, I could almost see this movie being a comedy. What's impulsive
and zany to one person is scary and unreliable to another. The movie has made
me reconsider a lot of older RomComs. How would Tom Hanks' or Julia Roberts'
kids feel about what's going on? Of course, this assumes that all those kids
wouldn't be written as "precocious" as a cover-all fix. Gyllanhaal
is much less present in the movie but good when he's around. Like his wife,
he's also finding that the American dream he's been chasing isn't working out.
I like how the screenplay teases certain problems with his character that don't
play out as I expected.
I like the idea of
Wildlife more than the execution. That's to be expected. I've never been
a fan of squirm comedy, so it's no surprise that I'm repelled by squirm drama.
Most of the movie is about people lying to each other's faces and assuming the
other people will be too polite to say anything. I'm certain that if I was able
to ask Dano or Kazan about the movie, they'd be able to go into great detail
about the deeper meaning of a lot of things in the movie, but I had a tough
time finding the point of the movie by myself. I appreciate the new perspective
on things, but that perspective left Mulligan's character in particular too
opaque to connect with. Mulligan's performance is great within those
restraints. I wish I knew more about how much of a change she's gone through. I
don't have enough of an idea who she was before, so I can't gauge if I believe
where she ends up.
Verdict (?):
Weakly Don't Recommend
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