Wildlife- d. Paul Dano (2018) Film Review

Critically acclaimed actor Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood, Love & Mercy) makes his directorial and screenwriting debut with the coming-of-age Richard Ford adaptation Wildlife. The film chronicles a romantic relationship in flux, thus it is only fitting that Dano co-wrote the screenplay with his long time partner Zoe Kazan. Wildlife marks the second creative collaboration of the couple, after costarring opposite each other in 2013’s Ruby Sparks, a romcom-drama written by Kazan. In contrast to their previous collaborative effort, Wildlife is decidedly all drama, no comedy.

    The film revolves around the Brinsons, a nuclear family moves to a small town in 1950s Montana longing for a fresh start, after the father, Jerry, is laid off from his work. There is a sense that the family’s troubles are cyclical; shortly after starting a job at the local golf course, Jerry is laid off again. The loss leads Jerry into a downward spiral of aimlessness and depression. As the family begins to fracture, a wildfire rages across the forest on the outskirts of town. Jerry quickly decides that volunteering to fight the fire is the quickest way to regain a sense of purpose and leaves his wife, Jeanette, and son, Joe, behind. As a result, Joe must witness his parents’ crumbling marriage and adjust into adulthood prematurely. 

    Actor Ed Oxenbould, who portrays Joe, previously appeared as the male lead in M. Night Shamalan’s twisted The Visit (2015) and the titular role in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (2014), but Wildlife feels like an out and out breakthrough for the actor; he portrays the complex emotion a child must wrestle with when a family breaks apart in painstaking detail. Carey Mulligan similarly impresses with a performance of reckless and self destructive mother Jeanette, while Jake Gyllenhaal portrays the idealistic yet immensely flawed Jerry. The lead cast is rounded out by Bill Camp, who portrays Miller, a man Jeanette has an affair with, and Zoe Margaret Colletti, who plays Ruth, Joe’s classmate and only confidant.

    The film relies solely on 35-50 mm lenses, a stylistic choice that forgoes wide angles and leaves it feeling less film-like and more intimate in a manner akin to the works of Asian auteurs Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) and Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love). Cinematographer Diego Garcia consistently makes use of voyeuristic framing throughout the film, as shots are frequently placed just outside the action, whether it be from doorways or house exteriors. Garcia’s stylistic choices create a deliberate sense of discomfort to me, as each shot is laced with a sort of emotional nakedness that feels too private to look at. The sense of voyeurism found throughout the shots reflect Joe’s own status as a passive onlooker, helpless in the dissolution of his parents relationship. There is a sense of poetic irony that Joe also has a job as portrait photographer after school. Whereas his home life is characterized by a certain passivity and bleakness around the family unit, Joe’s part-time photography job allows him to capture other families in moments of happiness. Not only is he able to participate in a form of escapism from his own family, but his photography allows him a degree of control in his life that is not present elsewhere. 

    Costume designer Amanda Ford exerts precise stylistic control into the film and expertly translates the shifting roles within the Brinson family dynamic through her subtle use of blues and reds. At the very beginning of the film, Joe wears a striped shirt featuring a combination of both blue and red, while Jerry wears blue, and Jeanette wears neutral colors. The harmony of the two most prominent colors in the film symbolically represents the cohesion of the nuclear family. Once Jerry loses his job, he takes on shades of red, underlining the tension between him and his wife and child, who continue to wear blue and neutral colors. When Jerry leaves to fight the fire, the colors shift once again: Joe takes on blue and Jeanette switches to red to note her self interest over the preservation of the family. In the final sequence, Joe brings his separated parents to his photo studio to take a picture together and he once agains wears a combination of blue and red to signify his desire for a cohesive family.

  Dano’s fascination with the concepts of self-interest and control in the context of a family dynamic provide a through line throughout the film. In one remarkable scene, Miller narrates to Joe over dinner a personal anecdote about purposely stalling his airplane high in the air while his loved ones watched. He tells Joe that in that moment “he lost all humanity” and did not care about anyone, yet he chose to stall the plane anyway. The story, though brief and seemingly out of place, contextualizes the actions of Jeanette and Jerry in relation to Joe; they primarily act in a manner that ultimately only serves their self-interest, whether it be Jerry running away from his marital problems to join the fight against the wildfire, or Jeanette cheating with Miller in Jerry’s absence. They consistently ignore the needs of their child for their own catharsis. Despite the frequently frustrating and selfish actions of both Gyllenhaal and Mulligan’s characters, they are written in such a human way that I still found myself empathizing with them, no matter how many rash decisions they make.

    Going into the film I was hopeful but nervous that it would trod the obvious narrative path of, say, a movie like The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), where a single parent works to provide and come through for their child against all odds. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised the more stark reality on display in Wildlife to be akin to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), where neither adult in the situation is inherently the better person. I was also surprised to see so much care put into every element of the film, from the emotionally textured acting, to Dano’s understated directing, to the carefully curated 1950’s mise-en-scene, to the color choices reflecting the narrative. Wildlife establishes Paul Dano as a director with a clear, empathetic vision towards the human condition, and one that I will keep my eye on for years to come.